
Class 

Book 

Copyright JJ°_ 



C0J3RIGHT DEPOSm 



DEAN HART 



RECOLLECTIONS 

AND 

REFLECTIONS 





DEAN HART. 



RECOLLECTIONS 

AND 

REFLECTIONS 



RECOLLECTIONS 

AND 

REFLECTIONS 



BY 

HENRY MARTYN HART, D.D.. lld. 

Dean of St. John's Cathedral, Denver, Colo. 

The Author of "A Way that Seemeth Right" (Christian Science), 

"The Tragedy of Hosea, and other Sermons." "The Ten 

Commandments in the Twentieth Century." "The 

Teacher's Catechism." "A Book of Prayers 

for Family and Personal Use." etc.. etc. 




Copyright, 1917, by J. W. Hart 
All Rights Reserved 






ILLUSTRATIONS 

Frontispiece Dean Hart 

The Rev. Joshua Hart Opp. page 16 y 

Otley Church Opp. page 16 

Montpelier House, Blackheath Opp. page 32 " 

The Dean and His Family, the week of leaving for 

Denver Opp. page 32 

Interior of Old St. John's in the Wilderness Opp. page 48 

Nave of the First St. John's Cathedral Opp. page 64 l 

Exterior of the First Cathedral Opp. page 80 

The Ruins of the First Cathedral Opp. page 96 

The Interior of the Chapter House Opp. page 128 

Designs for the New Cathedral Opp. page 144^ 

The Nave of the Cathedral from the Chancel Opp. page 160' 

The Interior from the Nave Opp. page 176 

The Cathedral of St. John's as It is To-day Opp. page 192 



©CIA462140 

m 27/9,7 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 
CHAPTER I. 

At the Beginning T 

CHAPTER II. 
Apparent Trifles 1$ 

CHAPTER III. 
The Way of Life 15 

CHAPTER IV. 
Western Life 21 

CHAPTER V. 
Unseen Agents 2& 

CHAPTER VI. 
Reminiscences Philanthropic 33 

CHAPTER VII. 
General Inaccuracy 3& 

CHAPTER VIII. 
Illustrative of Clerical Experiences 45 

CHAPTER IX. 
A Prison Experience 4S 

CHAPTER X. 
Incidents Connected with People I Have Known 51 

CHAPTER XI. 
On the Guidance of Life 7& 

CHAPTER XII. 
First Visit to Denver 81 

CHAPTER XIII. 
Hindu Peculiarities 100 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

CHAPTER XIV. 
On to Denver 104 

CHAPTER XT. 
My First Marriage Ceremony 112 

CHAPTER XVI. 
The Building of the First Cathedral 116 

CHAPTER XVII. 
St. Mark's 126 

CHAPTER XVIII. 
My Doctor's Degree 132 

CHAPTER XIX. 
On Matters Educational 134 

CHAPTER XX. 
The Wolfe Hall Episode 139 

CHAPTER XXI. 
Of Things Musical 147 

CHAPTER XXII. 
Some Odds and Ends 151 

CHAPTER XXIII. 
Incidents Psychological 166 

CHAPTER XXIV. 
The Tractarian Movement 182 

CHAPTER XXV. 
General Booth 186 

CHAPTER XXVI. 
Matters Electrical 190 

CHAPTER XXVII. 
The Destruction of the Old Cathedral 192 

CHAPTER XXVIII. 
The Bells 196 

CHAPTER XXIX. 
The Career of Higher Criticism 199 



RECOLLECTIONS 

AND 

REFLECTIONS 

CHAPTER I. 

At the Beginning. 

My father was the vicar of Otley, the principal town in the 
beautiful vale of the Wharfe. A Scotch doctor had firmly 
established himself to the almost exclusion of all competitors. 
Few people run the risk of thwarting a determined and jealous 
man ; and it was with many misgivings that my father consulted 
a young physician, in a neighboring village, for a growth which 
had appeared on the leg of my eldest sister. 

Dr. Spence was always for heroic treatment. I remember 
he had his portrait painted with a knife, not even a lancet, 
in his hand; undoubtedly he would have made, what he called, 
a free incision, and from the consequences of an open wound, in 
those days before antiseptic treatment was known and suppura- 
tion was supposed to be the natural process of healing, my 
father so shrank, that he braved the old doctors sure wrath 
and called in the younger man who was au fait with the newer 
methods of absorption. The result amply justified the risk, 
although, as the sequel will show, that risk was far greater than 
the vicarage anticipated. 

We all have the tendency to argue from our own point of 
•view, and naturally suppose that other people will act as we 
would, similarly placed. My father was the kindest and most 
consecrated of men, and he supposed his friend, the doctor, 

7 



8 Recollections and Reflections 

would be amenable to reason, and when he saw the result of his 
competitor's treatment he would condone his offense and return 
to amicable relations. But he had underrated the virus of that 
jealousy, which Milton well styled, "the first begotten of hell." 

It was my first contact with this bane of prominent life, 
and no small portion of these reminiscences will deal with the 
ramifications of the poisonous roots of jealousy. 

It was useless to attack the vicar by a frontal assault, so 
he made a flank movement, which, if successful, would give 
my father more work and a certain amount of distress, and by 
this move he would also gratify a private grudge at an intruding 
competitor. 

We had in our town another Scotch doctor who was "griev- 
ously afflicted with the palsy," Dr. Carfrae; his limbs were all 
but useless, but his head was untouched. As is usual, it is the 
ministers of religion to whom the non-religious turn in their 
hour of need, and Dr. Carfrae was dependent mainly upon my 
father for eking out a moderate existence. The vicar estab- 
lished him in a little surgery opening on the market-place, and 
filled the shelves with the stock-in-trade of a country doctor; 
for in those days the doctors sold their medicines and thus col- 
lected their revenue. At the opening of the year the farmers 
would be appealed to through small hand-bills, headed with the 
suggestive couplet — 

"A little physic in the spring, 
Is good for peasant and for king." 
Go to Dr. Carfrae, etc. 

Like others of his calling, the vicar looked about him far 
and wide for sources from which he could draw resources. He 
had managed to induce a medical relief association to vote a 
small pension to the disabled doctor, and the vicar had collected 
enough to buy a bath-chair, in which his crippled protege was 
wheeled about, "to take the air." 

Suddenly this pension money did not arrive. The vicar set 



At the Beginning 9 

about to find the reason. Finally the secretary of the society 
disclosed the fact that they had been informed by Dr. Spence, 
that Dr. Carf rae "had set up his carriage" and they very properly 
did not consider him a fitting subject for their benevolence. 
When they found that "the carriage" was a bath-chair pushed by 
a boy, they not only restored the pension, but they increased it. 

This transaction, and my father's gentle comments on it, 
made a deep impression on me, and did me great service, for 
I became steeled against any surprise, and I was quite aware 
that the most despicable devices would be restorted to by any 
man afflicted by jealousy, bent on mischief. I was thus fore- 
warned when, in after years, I had an ample experience of the 
same kind. 

While my father's memory is still in the foreground, let me 
chronicle another deduction from his life that has constantly 
been present with me, and which I have on every occasion sought 
to impress upon young clergymen for their guidance and stimu- 
Jation. 

Frederick Harrison once wrote that the only after-life we 
should enjoy would be the memory of us cherished by our 
friends. If that were true, then the after-life of most people 
would be of very short duration. 

I revisited Otley sixteen years after my father had been 
laid to rest ; I saw his photos still exhibited in the shop windows ; 
I found one of the ancients, an old woman who earned five 
shillings a week by weeding, and who had saved two pounds to 
buy an enlarged photograph of the old vicar, to which she 
pointed with pride and affection; and in 1915 they sent me the 
local paper which contained a long reference to him on the 
fiftieth anniversary of his death. 

Now, how did he thus imbed himself deep down into the 
affection of his people ? He was not what I should call a force- 
ful man; he had done little or nothing to improve the town 
materially; he had a very moderate income, the living was 



1G Recollections mid Reflections 

worth under three hundred pounds a year, and there were seven 
of us children; he had a genuinely artistic nature which ever 
guided him to do the tactful and wished-for thing. If he had 
been trained he would have been a distinguished tenor; he 
seemed not to have had any literary turn, or, at any rate, no 
occasion educed it. Although he was a most acceptable plat- 
form speaker, he was not a powerful preacher. He was a charm- 
ing and attractive preacher, and ever had in mind the edifying 
of his hearers, and as he used to say, "There should be in every 
sermon enough of the message of salvation that a casual hearer 
might lay hold on for eternal life." Then what was the secret 
of his remarkable power ? The answer is, his genuine piety. 

I do not know a more valuable deduction from a remark- 
able and distinct effect. We all desire power; to acquire 
influence is the real incentive of most men's energy. And this 
desideratum is within the reach of every one. We all have 
not capability, or mental calibre, or postion, or wealth, but 
piety is within the reach of all. It is accepting and continually 
living the dictates of the Lord Jesus Christ. 

I never saw even an unpleasant expression flit across his 
face; much less did I ever hear a hasty, not to say an angry, 
word escape his lips. He was uniformly cheerful, "rejoicing in 
the Lord always." His was the first voice, singing some hymn 
or chanting some psalm at six-thirty every morning. We had no 
comfortable bathrooms. He took a cold bath in a back kitchen 
with a flag floor, which, I have no doubt, contributed to his 
early death at sixty-six. It is unnatural to shock the system 
by a douche of cold water after a night in a warm bed. He 
then had a short thanksgiving in his study, and, after dressing, 
returned for reading and more deliberate prayer. Every morn- 
ing he gave to his sermon, and visited in the afternoon. But, 
and herein lay his power, he went into the church, across the 
churchyard, and he there reviewed the persons he intended to 



At the Beginning 11 

visit, and asked, doubtless, for "the word in season/' according 
to the needs of each. 

Now, it is qnite within the capability of every clergyman 
to adopt this simple scheme of pastoral life, and its persistent 
doing will insure the success which attended the ministry of 
the vicar of Otley. 

I have been in close touch with educational processes for 
more than half a century, but I never knew the machine worked 
more persistently, and at a higher pressure, than when, as a boy, 
I was submitted to its grind. 

When a crop of boys was coming into notice, being of "the 
best families/' the education proffered in what were called Na- 
tional Schools, was not considered of the proper quality, Dr. 
Spence proposed that a Scotch school master should be imported 
to educate the youth of the town. 

They secured a really remarkable man. He was a young 
man of some twenty-five winters. He must have "borne the 
yoke in his youth," for he was well and accurately grounded in 
almost any subject you could name. He was profound nowhere, 
but what he knew was accurate, and his working force was 
phenomenal. He saw no reason why every boy should not be 
as proficient as himself and that every boy should not thirst 
after knowledge and be as keen in its pursuit as he had been. 

He brought with him an instrument of torture called in 
Scotland, the Taws — a strip of thick leather some two feet long ; 
half of its length was cut into five strips, which were burned 
hard at the ends. With this strap he liberally administered 
"palmies." The culprit was commanded to hold out his hand 
and he thereupon received a well directed blow, which inflicted 
exquisite pain, but neither marked the flesh or so bruised the 
hand that it became temporarily useless. With this instrument 
of torture he mercilessly drove his herd of boys, thirty or 
forty of them, at a quick pace on the road to knowledge. We 
had small breathing time ; one half holiday on Saturday, a fort- 



12 Recollections and Reflections 

night at Christinas and four weeks in summer was all the 
respite we got. We had ten or twelve lessons to "get" every 
night. No one ever studied a lesson in school, and yet such was 
his capability of device that every boy was kept hard at work 
all day. 

There can be no question but that he impressed on ail his 
scholars the habit of work. A couple of years ago I accidentally 
discovered that he was still alive, retired in a seaport village on 
the South Devon coast, the very place I should have expected 
his practical sense would have led him to end in a soft and gentle 
climate his declining years. I wrote to him, and he described 
my letter as a resurrection from the dead. He was over ninety, 
and his mind was as vigorous as ever. 

The reason I narrate all this is what at first sight appears 
remarkable. In that West Riding town there must have been 
a hundred boys inured to hard mental work and accurately 
grounded in all elementary subjects, and yet, as far as I know, 
only three of them have at all come to the front. This is a proof 
that success is not wholly dependent on the capability for work. 
Carlyle's definition of genius, "an infinite capacity for taking 
pains," needs some modification, for if that system of intensive 
education had produced geniuses they must have been heard of. 

For myself, I am thankful for the experience, because it 
has impressed upon me the necessity of being employed ; I must 
be occupied, and if absolutely without engagement I lie down 
and go to sleep. 



CHAPTER II. 

Apparent Trifles. 

It must be ordained of God that, "it is not in man to 
direct his steps/' and that "the casting of the lot into the lap" is 
not chance; that every man who examines the incidents of his 
life must conclude that the trivialities which lead to the chief 
occasions of his life were of such a nature as to be altogether 
beyond his own control or devisement. The bend in the path 
of my life which took me to Blackheath was certainly the most 
important turn in my affairs, and it was the merest straw which 
determined the direction. 

I had gained some mathematical and scientific honors at 
the University of Dublin, which had secured for me the chief 
mathematical assistant-ship in a cramming establishment on Brix- 
ton Hill, "Cramming" was a rather invidious term which used to 
be applied to places where young men were prepared for the 
army and Indian civil service examinations. 

But cramming was by no means a spasmodic and superficial 
acquirement of answering certain questions. It rather referred 
to the great amount of work which had to be condensed into 
a certain short period. 

One night one of the masters asked me if I would take for 
him his study duty. It so happened that day that the head 
master had left the advertisement sheet of the Times on his desk, 
and my presence only being needed to give an occasional help, 
I occupied my leisure casually looking at the advertisements. 

There was one from the mathematical master of the Black- 
heath Preparatory School. He sought a certain kind of assist- 

13 



14 Recollections and Reflections 

ance which would leave me at liberty most of the day. I wrote 
a letter, and at this distance of time I forget what I said, but 
that advertisement produced fifty replies, and because of one 
sentence in my letter I obtained the situation. 

I remained at Blackheath; became the head master for 
seventeen years of a preparatory school; married the sister-in- 
law of Professor Drew, my senior; became incumbent of S, 
German's chapel, and left Blackheath for Denver in 1879. And 
all this followed upon the merest triviality, the accident of an 
accident. 

I remember Disraeli, in his novel "Lothair," which con- 
tains many of the deductions of his own wonderful career, says, 
that a man can always attain what he aspires to, provided that 
he genuinely loves the position; which, of course, means to 
say, that there is a something in his constitution and make-up 
which eminently fits him for the responsibilities of that position. 

But I believe that God guides by what may be called, The 
Hedging Providences of Life. It is perfectly possible by per- 
serverance and determination to kick open a closed door, but 
it is dangerous. Better touch the door, and if it does not open 
of its own accord no angel guides the way. And the rod of the 
good Shepherd gives a gentle touch, the guiding voice by which 
He speaks is the "still, small voice." You need an attentive ear 
to catch its accents. 



CHAPTEE III. 

The Way of Life. 

I used to have a Saxon proverb pinned over my desk, "Do 
ye next thinge" without regard to any possible effect, whether it 
would be beneficial to one's position or pocket ; helpfulness brings 
its own reward. 

I have always had reason to believe in the power of littles; 
that with God there can be no great and small ; that if He took 
more interest in what appear to us things of great import than 
He does in the merest trifles, He would do one thing more per- 
fectly than another which with God would be impossible. 

If of "every purposeless" word we are to give account, how 
microscopic must be his observation ; and how impossible it is to 
admit that the thousand and one items which fill in the inter- 
stices of life are not of His arrangement. Therefore, "despise 
not the day of small things." "Commit thy way unto the 
Lord" and "go softly." 

This care of small things is, of course, most prominent in 
the use of money. It is an inestimable advantage to me that 
I lived in an atmosphere of care. The living at Otley was a 
vicarage. A vicar is a person who is doing a vicarious service 
for another. In an ecclesiastical connection the vicar is the 
person who does "the duty" for the Lay-rector. 

A rector is the owner of the Great Tithes; often he is a 
layman, and, therefore, to provide for the spiritual oversight of 
the parish he must employ a priest, who becomes his vicar. 
When Henry VIII disendowed the Abbeys he found S. Mary's 
Abbey at York held the tithes of the parish of Otley. 

13 



16 Recollections and Reflections 

The monks sent a priest to serve the parish, and they gave 
him the option whether he should collect the tithes of his cure 
or whether the Abbey should pay him twenty marks a year and 
send their own collector to gather in the tithes. 

The priest elected to take twenty marks. So when the 
king bestowed upon one of his court the tithes of Otley, it was 
upon condition that the holder of the tithes should pay the vicar 
of Otley twenty marks (£13 6s. 8d.) a year. 

Of course, as more land came under cultivation and the 
population increased more tithes were collectable. The tithes 
becoming property descended with the family estates, and were 
often disposed of like any other piece of property. 

In my father's time a London firm of lawyers owned the 
Great Tithes. What they were then worth I do not know, but 
the twenty marks had retained their nominal value, while the 
tithes had vastly increased, and to this day the vicar of Otley 
has paid to him £13 6s. 8d., while his lay-rector, whose duty he 
is performing, takes the lion's share. 

It is this adjustment of the rights of the Church which is 
one of the great difficulties in the way of disendowment. So it 
came to pass that the important parish of Otley, which was 
comprised of several townships, provided its vicar with an income 
of less than three hundred pounds a year which came from the 
lesser tithes which had accrued since Henry the VIIFs time. 

For when a piece of common land was brought under 
cultivation it was subjected to tithing, and the farmer gave a 
tenth of all he gathered to the Church. I well remember in my 
boyhood the tithe barn was still standing. In 1848 Lord John 
Russell's ministry passed the Tithe Commutation Act ; by which 
the tithe was converted into a rent charge depending upon 
the current pric$ of wheat. 

This payment of the priest in kind, explains the meaning 
of the rubric, which directs that for the Communion he shall 




THE REV. JOSHUA HART, 27 YEARS VICAR OF OTLEY. 




OTLEY CHURCH AND THE VICARAGF. 



The Way of Life 17 

select out of the tithe offerings as much bread and wine as he 
deems fit for the Service and place it upon the Holy Table. 

The table upon which the tithings were placed was called, 
and is still, the Credence Table, which carries a sad and shame- 
ful memory. It was not an uncommon offense in Italy for a 
malicious official to poison the wine, which the priest would 
drink at the mass. Therefore he appointed a trusty person to 
taste it before it was placed upon the altar, and so he came to 
believe, credere, that he might drink it with confidence. 

So it came to pass that of necessity an atmosphere of care- 
fulness pervaded the vicarage. 

My father was a Londoner, and could not comprehend the 
general niggardliness which characterized the Yorkshire people 
of that day. I remember a mill owner, Yaddy Hartley, objecting 
to my pony nibbling the grass along an old Roman road which 
ran on the top of the Chevin, and which belonged to the flour 
man, because he said "the lambs might pick it up as they went 
along." 

There was a rich maiden lady who proffered her services as 
my godmother. The sole advantage I gained from that honor was 
she once gave me half a sovereign. Contrast her stinginess with 
a lady I know in Colorado who has put thirty-four young men 
through college and keeps in touch with all of them. 

Nevertheless, "the wrath of man praises Thee/' the covet- 
ousness of my godmother deterred her from putting me through 
college; but it was for my vast benefit that I got my degree 
through my own exertions. 

It has been of inestimable value to the building up of the 
English character that every square foot of the island is in the 
parish of some clergyman, who is sure to be a gentleman with 
a university degree ; for in my day it was almost an impossibility 
for a man to be ordained unless he had a degree. 

For the country folk to have living among them a gentle- 
man and his family was an education ; and to hear Sunday after 



18 Recollections and Reflections 

Sunday the splendid diction of the Book of Common Prayer 
and large portions of the English classic, the Authorized Version 
of the Bible, imperceptibly accustomed the ear to the best form 
of the language. 

If ever the Church is disendowed, and the maintenance of 
the clergy is thrown upon the parishioners, the Church in the 
country places cannot be supported, and the tone of the char- 
acter of the people will of a surety be lowered. 

I met at the Bishop of London's Archbishop Alexander 
and I asked him, now there had elapsed several years since the 
disestablishment and disendowment of the Irish Church, what 
was his opinion of that radical chance. He replied, without 
hesitancy, "I say it is an unmitigated evil." 

It may be the general rise in prices and the curtailing of 
English farming in virtue of the over-sea competition with 
wheat from the virgin soil of the Northwest, Canada and of 
Argentina, and the consequent reduction of tithes which has 
brought great hardship to many a clergyman's family. All this 
may be a salutary preparation for the disendowment of the 
English Church in compelling the clergy to cast about them to 
gain their support from other sources, primarily from the people 
who profit by their ministrations. 

This is as it should be. If the clergyman were paid in 
proportion to his value to the community, this would act as a 
perpetual incentive against that laziness and indifference which 
is the bane of the country clergyman. We all are human and 
all need stimulating to do our duty effectively. 

This atmosphere of carefulness naturally induced a habit 
that has proved to me to be a great saver of time and money. 
Not having money to spend upon tobacco was probably the main 
reason why I never smoked. I am willing, of course, to admit 
that four hundred millions of the human race must find pleasure 
in smoking; but, nevertheless, I question if the benefit equals 
the expenditure. 



The Way of Life 19 

One of our clergy in Colorado smoked forty-two cigars 
in a day, and thinking that he was smoking too much he had 
the sense to stop altogether. When I was a young clergyman 
it was considered almost wicked to smoke, and many a university 
man, the night before he was ordained, threw his briar into 
the fire, and I have often seen one or two daring spirits leave a 
clericus and go down into the cellar of the house and enjoy a 
pipe. 

An Episcopal friend of mine, whom the Queen often used 
to command to Windsor to preach before her, was very fond 
of his cigar, and one Sunday night he put his head out of his 
bedroom window and puffed away. Her majesty smelled him, 
and sent an equerry to say, if the bishop wished to smoke he 
would be shown a room in the distant recesses of the palace. 

Bishop Grafton, who was an Englishman, came over to 
this country strongly prejudiced against the clerical use of 
tobacco. On becoming a member of the House of Bishops, he 
proposed a resolution forbidding the bishops to indulge. Bishop 
Wilmer, who was a well known humorist, turned round to a 
neighbor as the proposition was being offered, and asked, "Who's 
that ?" When told it was the Bishop of Fond du Lac, he turned 
abruptly on his seat, with, "fond of milk." 

Things, however, began to change before I left London. 
One of the great London tobacconists lived next door to my 
church in Blackheath. He used to say to me, "Parson, if you'll 
smoke I'll find the 'bacca." To which I generally replied, "If I 
could get a ton a week out of you I would begin." For it would 
teach him a lesson in giving, of which he was sorely in need. 

Another piece of economy which I can trace to a habit 
acquired at the vicarage, was the strong disinclination which 
possessed me of spending money on my own gratification, or for 
what people call amusements. I could very well do without 
theatrical entertainments, and when I became a young clergy- 
man of the evangelical school I, of course, looked upon the 



20 Recollections and Reflections 

theatre as a very distinctive agent of the World which I waa 
urging my congregation to eschew. As the years advanced my 
record, that I had never seen a play in a theatre, became a 
valuable asset in influencing younger men to abstain from that 
temptation, for no one could say that I was straight-laced or of 
a fanatical temperament. 

The strongest argument against the influence of the Play 
seemed to me, from an outside observation, that the feelings 
excited by the performance led to no concommitant action. 
Women would tell me that they had wept copiously, but appar- 
ently it had resulted in no change of habit, or desire to alleviate 
suffering, plenty of which lay close to their hand. Feelings are 
given to us as incentives to action, and if feelings are evoked 
which produce no effect in actual life, it is plain there must be 
spiritual waste, which cannot but be deleterious to effective char- 
acter building. 

And when I came to Denver, where I was once hissed in 
church for some trenchant remarks that I had made about a 
Shrove Tuesday masked ball, if I had been seen at the theatre 
the newspaper next morning would have displayed me in a 
cartoon with a ballet girl on each knee, and a bottle of wine 
between us ! 

I am very well aware that never having seen a play acted 
I have denied myself a certain uplift I might have profited by, 
but I once was asked to meet the president of the Dramatic 
League, a society which sends round to its members a recom- 
mendation of what plays are worth seeing, and I asked the presi- 
dent what percentage they recommended. He replied, "Four- 
teen." If, therefore, I had been in search of improvement, the 
little I should have obtained would have been wholly submerged 
by the preponderance of rubbish I must have paid for. 



CHAPTER IV. 

Western Life. 

In Denver we have a State and a city law which forbids 
any exhibition on Sunday. In 1893 one or two second class 
theatres began to defy the law. Believing that it is injurious 
to the stamina of a community to permit a law to be per- 
sistently broken with impunity, I said, as long as the law is on 
the statute book every right minded citizen ought to see to its 
observance. I therefore brought action against one of the 
theatres. Of course, a press, which exists only for its own 
benefit, derided my attempt, lampooned my witnesses, and gen- 
erally stirred up opposition. The following Sunday, the police, 
in order to make my attempt unpopular, raided a German 
concert, arrested the orchestra and took them all to the City Hall. 
Of course, a mob gathered, and somebody shouted, "to Dean 
Hart's." I heard the sound of many voices coming up the 
street, and suspecting their intent, I had the blinds of the Dean- 
ery drawn down and the lights lowered. The mob gathered 
outside the garden pailings, none of them being brave enough to 
come to close quarters; some boys threw stones at the windows, 
but a solitary policeman was sufficient to drive them away. He 
then came to the side door and asked if he could do anything 
else. As it was then supper time I told him to go into the 
kitchen and regale himself, which, of course, he did, and the 
mob dispersed. 

The news of this really ridiculous emeute spread like wild- 
fire through the country. The Associated Press agent sent 
exaggerated reports to the East, for which he was afterwards 

21 



22 Recollections and Reflections 

discharged. I refer to this episode chiefly to illustrate the hope- 
less unreliability of the press. The newspaper is the only 
medium through which we gather news, but how inefficient and 
inaccurate are the statements they give us, we never know 
unless we have first hand information. I gathered together a 
score of Eastern papers which presented their readers with 
account of this riot. Here is what some of them said: 

"Denver has a genuine riot/' says a special to the New 
York World; "at this hour, 11 p. m., seventy-five police are 
attempting to disperse 2,000 excited citizens * * * who have 
attacked the residence of Dean Hart, of Trinity Episcopal 
Church." New York Evening Telegram: "The instigator of 
the raid upon all the theatres in the city." New York Evening 
Sun: "The Dean is an Englishman, refuses to become natural- 
ized, and boasts of it; for the past two months he has agitated 
the closing of Sunday places of amusement ; he has been severe 
in his criticisms and has spared none." The Chicago Herald: 
"The citizens are so much in favor of running places of Sun- 
day amusement that the people, to the number of 2,000, marched 
to the Dean's residence and would probably have razed it to the 
ground had not the authorities interfered." The Brooklyn 
Eagle: "The Dean had been advised that the crowd was com- 
ing and had barely time to escape by means of a convenient 
back door and the aid of a fast horse." The New York Evening 
Sun: "Which bore him to the forest." The San Francisco 
Chronicle: "This mode of escape, however, there is some doubt 
about." The New York World had a telegram: "At 10:30 
o'clock tonight a cab drove swiftly up, a guard of police formed 
about the door and the Dean (leaving his wife and sick daughter 
behind him) hastily made his way to the vehicle. Two police- 
men got inside and one on the box and away the carriage rattled 
in the darkness." Be this as it may, the New York Tribune 
says: "That the way of escape of the minister only served to 
anger the mob. 'Into the yard!' some one shouted. The mob 



Western Life 23 

moved against the fence; it gave way like so much paper. A 
murmur was followed by a yell, and a shower of stones was sent 
through the windows. The porches were mounted, and in a few 
moments a riot was in progress." 

It must have been at this juncture, that, according to the 
Western Christian Advocate of Cincinnati: "They battered in 
the house, destroying his furniture, frightened his sick daughter 
well-nigh to death." The reader, however, will be greatly relieved 
by the New York Evening Post: "That at this moment patrol 
wagons from the First and Second Division stations arrived. 
Men were knocked down by the horses, and then the police, clubs 
in hand, beat the mob back and drove the people out of the 
hallway." The New York Tribune continues: "After a sharp 
but desperate struggle the police forced the angry men back. 
Revolvers were drawn." "Many," says the pink Evening Tele- 
gram, "were injured in the head. Black eyes were numerous, 
and the blood from the pounding and scratching flowed freely." 
However, according to the Chicago Herald: "The sight of the 
determined bluecoats, prepared to resist to the last, subdued the 
mob. They shrank back.muttering and cursing the police." The 
New York World adds: "The Dean is now stowed away in 
the home of one of his parishioners." While the Living Church 
very properly hopes "that the leaders of this murderous assault 
will be promptly and severely dealt with." The Churchman 
seems inclined to have me canonized and for the future would 
certainly deem me nothing less than a "confessor." 

It is seldom we have so good an opportunity of judging of 
the actual value of newspaper reports. No doubt if we were 
equally familiar with the details of every narrative, we should 
find every one far from the truth. The Republican was indig- 
nant at the senders of the false reports ; but it opened its tirade 
with a deliberate falsehood, that the reports emanated from its 
rival, the News. Why did it not discover the actual perpetrator 
and have him punished ? But, alas ! the reason for its wrath is, 



24 Recollections and Reflections 

not that truth has been defamed, but that, forsooth, the character 
of the city may be injured, and the flow hither of men and 
money checked. It does not reckon its own vast transgressions, 
decoying here by endless inflation unsuspicious people, leaving 
us ministers to take care of not a few of them. The true way 
to help our city to achieve a lasting and valuable character, 
is to write with dignity, accuracy and unflinching morality; to 
scrupulously uphold the law, and unwearyingly defend the 
oppressed and the wronged. The account it gave of the dis- 
turbance was not to its credit, and it never raised a note of 
censure. The News, although it produced an admirable article 
on Sunday amusements, still headed a column with "Indigna- 
tion" in big type. Indignation for what ? Because certain good 
citizens attempted to make certain bad citizens keep the law. 
Because some of the best people in the city desired to see a law 
still observed which two second class theatres had been intent 
on breaking only during the last year. Surely it was the citizens 
who had a right to be indignant and not the transgressors. 

The whole episode, indeed, redounds little to the credit of 
the newspaper fraternity. It would seem that the chief room 
in their synagogue had been appropriated by Mr. Peck's bad boy. 



CHAPTER V. 

Unseen Agents. 

Blackheath, being in the neighborhood of Woolwich, the 
West Point of England, was a favorite location for "Crammers," 
as those gentlemen were called who prepared young men to pass 
the Army examinations. There was one on my side the Heath 
and another about a mile away on the other side. 

One morning, my friend, Mr. Clayton, who lived a few 
doors from me, came hurriedly into my study, and said: "A 
dreadful thing has happened. We found Sanderson, who was 
evidently just getting up, with his legs still upon his bed and 
his body upon the floor with his neck so bent that he had 
choked to death." 

At exactly the same time exactly the same accident had 
happened to one of the pupils at the establishment on the other 
side of the Heath, but he had been discovered before his life 
had been extinguished. Why should it not be believed that one 
of the minions of Satan, to whom the Lord Himself ascribed the 
power of death, bent on mischief, had caused in his passage 
through the neighborhood, those two young men to do the same 
thing at the same time. 

I sometimes wonder if material things, especially machines, 
are not used by our temptors to try our patience. 

The organ in our old Cathedral was blown by a water- 
motor. I often used to think a demon possessed it, for occa- 
sionally for no assignable reason, it refused to work. I have 
often stayed with it far into the night, adjusting and readjust- 
ing its valves so that the organ might be of service next day. 

25 



26 Recollections and Reflections 

And finding me imperturbable, suddenly the machine would go, 
as if an adverse hand had been lifted from its throttle. 

I especially remember on one Easter Sunday, when it is a 
deep-rooted American conviction that to save one's soul you 
must appear in the church, in the middle of the Te Deum the 
organist said to me, "There is no wind, sir." With all the 
dignity I could muster, I left my stall, but the moment I passed 
the vestry door gathering up my vestments I was soon down in 
the motor room, and finding a monkey-wrench lying on the floor, 
I threw it at the motor, saying : "What ? And on Easter Sun- 
day, too." And the motor went on regularly through the rest 
of the service. And I was back in time to read the lesson 
apparently unruffled. 

On one of my visits to England I spent some weeks in 
Wharf dale, and one of the squires of the valley, Mr. Whittaker, 
of Greenholm, told me of this singular peculiarity about a gun. 
Now, if the same thing happens twice, or even three times, it 
might be called a coincidence, but if an extraordinary occur- 
rence happens four or five times, some other theory must be 
found to account for it. 

A Mr. Dawson, of Weston Hall, gave a gun to Mr. Wilson, 
the Vicar of Addingham. He was out with a shooting party 
one day and shooting behind him he hit one of the beaters 
picking up a rabbit, putting out his left eye. 

Disgusted at his carelessness he gave the gun to a neighbor ; 
this gentleman, with the gun, accidently shot out Mr. Crabtree's 
left eye, who was Mr. Wilson's father-in-law. Convinced that 
some ill luck was associated with that gun he gave it to one 
of the keepers. Shortly afterwards there was another shooting 
party on the estate. One of the gentlemen was very careful in 
keeping corks in his gun barrels, but he forgot to remove them 
and burst his gun. 

The keeper was sent to his house for another, and the mes- 
senger returned with the ill-starred gun, and incredible as it may 



Unseen Agents 27 

appear, he during the day accidental}- shot out Mr. Wilson's left 
eye. It is difficult to believe that a spirit of mischief had not 
had some handling of that gun. 

I should think that many an auto driver could supply 
instances where the erratic behaviour of his machine could not 
well be accounted for by any other supposition. 

All this may seem extravagant and worse, but if we believe 
and pray that God's Holy Spirit may cleanse the thoughts of 
our hearts by supplying us with good thoughts to the exclusion 
of evil thoughts and seeing the extraordinary power of mind 
over matter, why should we not credit good and bad actions done 
through the body to the spiritual agencies which influence the 
mind. 

For, after all, the mind, which appears to be the active 
principle of soul, is probably the artificer of the body. It was 
a brilliant adventure of Spencer. 

"For of the soule the bodie forme doth take, 
For soule is forme and doth the bodie make." 

Medical practice which undertakes the preservation of the 
body, a century ago had run completely into materialism. For 
one of those unexplainable reasons which influence the trend 
of the thoughts of a generation, a revolution against materialism 
began to gather head. 

Homeopathy made its appearance, and shortly afterwards 
Christian Science carried the red flag of opposition against the 
doctors beyond the confines of reasonableness. In consequence 
of this change of face, many minds were turned to investigate 
Psychic force, and although Psychotherapy has not yet been 
reduced to anything like an exact science, still Suggestion is 
very widely used by knowledgable physicians, and with astonish- 
ing results. 

The personal equation occupies such a prominent position 
in treatment by Suggestion that its successful use must always 



28 Recollections and Reflections 

remain in the hands of specialists; and for this reason it can 
never be used with assured certainty. 

Operations have been painlessly performed on Mesmerized 
subjects; but owing to the irregularity of its action Mesmerism 
has not as yet found any definite place in surgical science. 
Mesmerism appears to be an artificial means of so completely 
occupying the sub-conscious self, the under-mind, with an idea, 
that the mind is unable to take cognizance of any other sensa- 
tions presented to it. 

This probably is the working of the natural law which 
causes animals to be apparently free from pain when being 
preyed upon. A mouse in the mouth of a cat never struggles. 
Many instances are recorded of men seized by wild beasts being 
at the time unconscious of pain. 

Lieutenant General Brownlow told me, that he was hunting 
with a brother officer in an Indian jungle, when a tiger sprang 
upon his friend, who was just in advance. The shot with which 
he met the tiger's charge, broke his lower jaw. In the impetus 
of the spring the tiger cleared the first officer, and with his 
mangled mouth seized the hand of Captain Brownlow, which 
to this day is crippled. 

The General said he felt no pain, only as if he had been 
struck, and the uppermost thought which occupied his mind 
as the tiger had its paws on his shoulders, was, "What an ex- 
ceedingly ugly brute you are/' 

A similar instance was told me by Major Sheppard. His 
regiment was encamped near a village which was molested by a 
man-eating tiger. The natives sent to the officers to rid them 
of their terror. As is usual, a small platform was erected in 
the tree in the sight of the remains of a cow which the tiger 
had killed the night before. 

When the tiger came to finish his repast the Major severely 
wounded him and he sprang with an angry growl toward some 
rocks. After waiting a considerable time the Major descended 



Unseen Agents 29 

from the tree and very foolishly went to find the tiger, who 
pounced upon him with the agility of a cat upon a mouse, and 
dragged him off by the shoulder. Dropping him for a moment, 
he took a firmer and more balanced hold lower down, crunching 
several of his ribs, and so carried him off. 

But it was the last effort of the tiger's life, and he dropped 
dead. The Major's shoulder blade and some of his ribs were 
broken, and he came to London to undergo an operation which 
he hoped would restore the use of his arm. 

A day or two after his arrival he dined with me and he 
told me that, as the tiger was carrying him away, he felt no pain 
and the only thought which occupied his mind was, "I wonder 
at which end he will begin to eat me." 

This extraordinary capability of the mind for detaching 
itself even from the most pressing demands upon its attention 
is the characteristic upon which it is possible for "Suggestion" 
to act. It is this psychic action to which cures, which lie out- 
side usual medical practice, are to be ascribed. 

In all tribes and peoples there have been found all sorts of 
men and places with curative powers from the Witch doctor of 
the African savage to the Monarch Touching for the King's evil. 

The great temples of the ancient world were all centres of 
curative reputation. Plutarch relates that the fame of the 
Temple of Serapis in North Egypt was world-wide. The canals 
leading there were thronged with boats, festooned with flowers 
bringing away people who had been healed. 

In our day the same wonder-working has been notorious at 
Lourdes. Every year "The White Train," filled with invalids, 
attended by ladies of the highest rank, passed through France 
to the Well where two children declared they had seen the 
Blessed Virgin. And all the cures of the devout are ascribed to 
her direct influence. 

Since Mon. Lazarre brought Lourdes into fame, Christian 
Science has presented itself as a curing cult, and has spread 



30 Recollections and Reflections 

with phenomenal growth. Its popularity is due to the daring 
assertion of its founder, Mrs. Eddy, that it has been given to her 
to produce a key which unlocks the Scriptures to the modern 
world. 

She declares it is a prerogative of Christianity to heal sick- 
ness. She established a school of healing which in reality teaches 
a method of hypnotism. The mind is soothed by a repetition of 
senseless phrases and the hypnotic state is insensibly produced 
just as was the case by the passes of the Mesmerists years ago. 

Then the Suggestion is supplied by which the cure is 
effected. Now inasmuch as this process is within the reach of 
anybody and not only gives distinction to a great many other- 
wise mediocre people but also brings emolument easily, the cult 
has rapidly spread. 

What cures are wrought are effected by hypnotic sugges- 
tion which is the curative force of all such popular healings. 
Christian Science is a recrudescence of Pantheism. Its funda- 
mental assertion is that God is All. Now the Pantheist must 
deal with what we call Evil in one of two ways. 

He must either, with the Hindu, credit God with being the 
author of evil and a party to its existence, or he must assert, as 
the Christian Scientist does, that Evil has no actual existence 
but is a deception practised upon us by what Mrs. Eddy calls, 
'"Mortal Mind/' The result of the Hindu theory that God is a 
party to the practice of evil is, that that country is soaked with 
immorality, for the morality of no nation can be higher than of 
the God it worships. 

When Lord Northbrook was the Governor General of India 
he attempted to carry out a law for the repression of indecency 
and he was compelled to make an exception in favor of the 
Temples. For to have abolished indecency from these sacred 
places would have been to have driven the gods from their abodes 
and to have suppressed public worship. 

The Christian Scientists, professing to take the Bible for 



Unseen Agents 31 

their authority, are compelled either to divert or suppress its 
plainest statements. In asserting healing the sick is one of the 
prerogatives of Christianity they shut their eyes to the fact that 
our Lord lived twenty-eight years in Nazareth without doing 
any remarkable work. In that time Joseph must have sickened 
and died, and almost a whole generation of inhabitants must 
have passed away. 

His works are entirely connected with His public ministry, 
and as He Himself often declared these "Signs" were presented 
by Himself and His followers as credentials of their authority 
to declare the Forgiveness of sins by the death and sacrifice of 
the Saviour of the world. 

And, as if to rebuke this very cult, the first "Sign/' a sign 
being an action which conveys intelligence, was not a healing of 
the sick at all but the turning of one hundred twenty gallons of 
water into wine at the marriage feast in Cana of Galilee. 

It has been found, wherever careful tabulation was possible, 
that the proportion of the cures effected by all these means is 
five per cent. In the case of Christian Science this would cer- 
tainly hold true if a register of all the attempted cures were 
kept. If this proportion is at all correct it would mean that five 
per cent, of all the diseases, to which our flesh is heir, is due to 
nerval derangement which Suggestion is capable of restoring to 
its normal condition. 

This proportion received a remarkable corroboration from 
Sclatter. This man was a mystic and unlike Christian Science 
healers he refused to receive money for what he professed "The 
Father did through him." He stood in the yard of Alderman 
Fox and a crowd of applicants passed in front of the gate. 

The enthusiasm of the crowd was, of course, one of the 
conditions of the cures ; when the crowds waned the cures failed, 
and Sclatter disappeared. Alderman Fox kept a rough estimate 
of the cures effected and he found it was the usual five per cent. 

One of his most extraordinary cures came under my per- 



32 Recollections and Reflections 

sonal observation. A young man, who was brought up in the 
Cathedral, had nerval dyspepsia. In spite of our best medical 
skill he gradually grew worse until finally a drink of milk pro- 
duced convulsions. And the simplest of all human nourishment 
had to be taken from him with the stomach-pump, without a 
shadow of a doubt he must have died within 10 days — when 
Sclatter appeared. 

He stood with the expecting crowd awaiting his turn. The 
healer looked at him with his dreamy mystical gaze, squeezed 
his hand and said, "The Father says you are well, go and eat." 
He went downtown and ate a lunch of canned salmon without 
the slightest inconvenience ; he was completely cured. 

The fact that Christian Science denies the need of a 
Saviour; asserts that Jesus disappeared at the Ascension; de- 
clares that "to pray to a personal God is a hindrance" and that 
"the Holy Ghost is Divine Science," puts it beyond the pale of 
any conception of the doctrine of Jesus ; and justifies the popular 
conundrum, "Why is Christian Science like a guinea-pig?" 
"Because a guinea-pig is neither a guinea nor a pig and Chris- 
tian Science is neither Christian nor Science." 




NONTPFI.ER KO'JSE— OUR Rl.A KHEATH R V S DFNCE. 




TAKEN IN OUR GARDEN AT BLACKHEATH ONLEAVING FOR DENVER. 



CHAPTER VI. 

Reminiscences Philan thropic. 

Blackheath was fifty years ago a favorite suburb of London 
where a number of London merchants resided, thence going 
backward and forward by numerous morning and evening 
trains. The horde of beggars who solicited alms of the gentle- 
men returning home became such a nuisance that I devised a 
plan which was so efficacious that every beggar departed from 
our neighborhood in a week. One neighboring township after 
another was compelled in self-defence to adopt the same plan. 

The great Lord Shaftesbury had spent his life in social 
service in the East End but he had died leaving no successor. 
Nevertheless, being dead he yet spoke, and the echoes of social 
service were reverberating. If this had not been so it is quite 
possible that the organization of charity might have been de- 
layed for some time. 

The Blackheath Mendicity Society was simple in its opera- 
tion and singularly effective. I printed paper sheets of per- 
forated tickets about the size of two or three postage stamps. 
The name and address of the Society's office with an intimation 
that all worthy applicants would be helped was all that the ticket 
contained. 

Every house in Blackheath was supplied with a sheet of 
tickets, and the neighborhood placarded, that, no money should 
be given to beggars but a Mendicity Ticket. 

Suddenly the whole tribe of professional beggars found 
themselves amply supplied with tickets which were of no value 
other than being an introduction to the Society's officer. When 

33 



34 Recollections and Reflections 

the applicant presented the ticket, the officer asked him his 
address and, if he had applied for parish relief in his district. 
If not, why not? 

All this was entered upon a printed slip which was placed 
in an envelope directed to the relieving officer of that district. 
It is needless to say that generally all kinds of dodges were 
adopted to avoid its presentation. 

The applicant often professed he was merely a working man 
passing through Blackheath going to Chatham or some other 
centre of labor; in that case the officer presented him with a 
third-class ticket and saw him on the train. If he had not 
broken his fast that day he was presented with a new loaf of 
bread and was referred to the pump for a drink. 

Very rarely an actual case of destitution was discovered. 
Then such were the ample funds of the Society that substantial 
relief was afforded. The value of this proceeding is apparent; 
it unified the neighborhood; there were no rents in the net out 
of which the fish might escape; it brought into requisition the 
agencies the law had devised for dealing with poverty and 
moreover it supervised the action of the poor law officer which 
was, occasionally, overbearing and harsh. 

After this plan had been in action two or three weeks it 
was surprisingly successful. I wrote a letter on January 9, 
1869, to the Times and that great paper did me the honor of 
writing a leading article upon the value of my philanthropic 
experiment which concluded, "The proposal is, so far as it 
extends, systematic and complete. It admits of indefinite exten- 
sion and while moderating in proper cases the inevitable harsh- 
ness of the Poor Laws, it increases their general efficacy." 

This immediately attracted wide attention. Lord Litch- 
field, who had been shocked into action by a genuine working 
man, who passing through his village, had been unable to obtain 
relief and had actually died of starvation at his park-gates, 
immediately took an interest. 






Reminiscences Philanthropic 35 

The practical nature of the Blackheath experiment securing 
as it did the co-operation of all philanthropic agents, both public 
and private, and its prevention of the overlapping of charity at 
once appealed to his Lordship. 

After some preliminary consultation Lord Litchfield, a 
barrister, Mr. Wilkinson, Dr. Hawkesley and myself met in a 
room in Buckingham Street, which was the office of the asso- 
ciation for the prevention of pauperism and crime and inaugu- 
rated "The Charity Organization Society" as its title, was after- 
wards determined upon on April 9, 1870. 

Lord Litchfield interested Lord Ebury, Lord Grosvenor and 
many other distinguished men. And the Board of the Society 
assembled representatives of most of the charitable organizations 
of London and a vast deal of time, thought and experience was 
brought to bear in devising means for the best application of 
charity, preventing overlapping and dealing most successfully 
with pauperism. 

Many active constructionists offered their services, such as 
Mr. Ribton-Turner, Mr. Bosanquet, Mr. Alsager, Hay Hill and 
bis sister, Miss Octavia Hill, and the latest representative is Dr. 
C. S. Lock, who is so celebrated for his work in the organization 
and application of charity and in dealing with the tendencies of 
pauperization, that the University of Oxford conferred upon him 
the degree of D.C.L., and the King, a Knighthood. 

I received, of course, all kinds of letters for and against the 
scheme; this one, I retained in my scrap-book. The writer was 
evidently a professional beggar, who found his career so abruptly 
impeded that he poured forth his vituperations upon me, thus : 

Hyde Park. 

Sir : — I have just read your hard-hearted, close fisted, inhu- 
man letter in the Times. 

Verily, God shall judge between your world-wise inhuman 
scheme and the poor. Who made you to differ from many of 



36 Recollections and Reflections 

those who have been compelled to solicit alms or die? Shame 
upon yon. I know the masses of England and there does not 
exist a heart nnfossilfied by gold, or pride of position, or selfish- 
ness but will lift up this prayer and cry to Him, "Who careth 
for the poor/' but rejects the heartless cynic and oppressor. 
From his counsel, from his practice, from his selfishness, from 
his pride of superior cunning to detect the poor, "Good Lord 
deliver us." When you have forgotten your letter it shall blaze 
with an eternal condemnation upon so miserable a man. Read 
Mr. Measor's letter and blush. One who loves to follow Jesus 
doing good. R p F F t TZWILLIAMS . 

I have, therefore, had no small experience in the adminis- 
tration of charity. As much as $3,000 a year has passed through 
my hands for many years, and I have come to the conclusion 
that our forefathers expressed a fundamental truth in the nur- 
sery rhyme, 

Humpty Dumpty had a great fall; 
All the king's horses and all the king's men 
Couldn't lift Humpty Dumpty up again. 
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall 

Which means to say, under the symbolism of an egg, which has 
no skeleton, no backbone, and all of whose constitution is held 
together by an outside shell, that a person who has no self-reli- 
ance, no initiative, no moral stamina, whose consistency of char- 
acter is entirely held together by outside circumstances, if such 
a person fall down in the race of life it is impossible so to recover 
him that he can go along independently. It is a good thing 
to remember that there are numbers of people who are constitu- 
tionally unable to live life without assistance. 

The style of the public education has not been devised to 
counteract the natural inability of such people. It is a scandal 
and a reproach that there should be a submerged tenth which is 



Reminiscences Philanthropic 37 

composed of ineffectives. So numerous are they in London that 
the Bishop of London said the other day that if all the people, 
who were dependent for a living on outside assistance, were to 
be sent northward to Edinburgh in single file, before the last of 
them left London, the leader of the limping procession would be 
entering the Scottish Capital. 

The order of God's Providence has compensated for this 
failure of our civilization by establishing the poor as his Re- 
ceivers, for "he that giveth to the poor lendeth to the Lord." The 
only question to be settled is, who are the legitimate poor ? 



CHAPTER VII. 

General Inaccuracy. 

In 1874 a Mr. Ramsden, whose son was one of our boys, 
stated that he was the owner of twenty-five square miles in 
Iceland which contained the greater part of the sulphur in the 
Island. That he wished to form a small Joint-Stock Company 
and put the sulphur upon the market. 

In those days gun-powder could only be made with natural 
sulphur. For no process had yet been discovered for procuring 
the sulphur in a sufficiently pure state from iron or copper 
pyrites. That if I would sign a circular stating the history of 
the property we should easily get sufficient capital to launch the 
project. 

Mr. Ramsden had in his possession five or six reports. One 
of them was from a naval officer whom the Government had sent 
out to report upon the sulphur deposit. This report said that 
the sulphur was practically inexhaustible, that it was only neces- 
sary to pile stones around a souferole, or orifice from which a 
jet of steam was arising, and "Flowers of Sulphur" would 
deposit upon the stone. 

In his office in London he had a tub full of sulphur in large 
crystals and the previous year he had sent out the well-known 
civil-engineer, Mr. Wentworth-Shields to survey a railroad forty 
miles long to carry the sulphur from Husivik to the capital 
Reykjavik. 

I fortunately adhered to my resolution of never signing any 
report except I had assured myself of its correctness by personal 
investigation. At Mr. Ramsden's request, I undertook to visit 



General Inaccuracy 39 

Iceland. A Danish gunboat touched at Leith, the port of Edin- 
burgh, once a month en route for Iceland returning in a week's 
time. 

I found myself a fellow-voyager with a geological explorer, 
Mr. Watts, who was intent upon crossing the glacier Scaptar- 
yokul, which comes down the side of Mount Hekla, and some 
Officers of the Guard intending to fish in the Icelandic rivers. 

After a rough passage, during which a sailor broke his leg, 
we arrived at Reykjavik. There I was met by Dr. Hatjlin, the 
chief physician of the Island, to whom Mr. Ramsden had paid 
one hundred pounds a year for some years to conserve his prop- 
erty. The Doctor, as soon as he knew of my arrival, introduced 
me to the Governor who invited me to a public dinner to signal 
my visit. I was the guest of the Doctor, who the next day sent 
me off with a troop of ponies, guides and camping paraphernalia, 
to see the celebrated geysers, which, said the Doctor, "A man of 
your scientific reputation (which was of a very feeble nature) 
must necessarily inspect." 

One of my compagnons de voyage was a Dublin stock-broker 
who, strange to say, appeared to be able to repeat all the Psalms 
in Latin. As there are no trees in Iceland all the lumber of 
which the houses in Reykjavik were built came from Denmark; 
the jail was the only stone edifice. 

And that was of lava, which is the substance of the whole 
island as far as I could see. There was only one piece of road, 
not a mile long, leading northwards out of the town. The rest 
of the paths were trails which barely scratched themselves upon 
the hard plutonic-rock. 

We slept that night in the gallery of a church, the pastor 
bringing us excellent black coffee and a magnificent trout. Next 
morning, when we bade him farewell, I induced the stock-broker 
to address him in a Latin oration. 

I found that colloquial Latin was taught in the Danish 
public-schools which was a piece of information which proved 



40 Recollections and Reflections 

of great service to me for I could communicate with my guides 
in Latin ; and in after years, when I came to Colorado, I found 
the President of the Standing Committee to be a Danish peas- 
ant, who posed, because of his colloquial Latin, as a profound 
Theologian and was duly honored by the Bishop and the Clergy. 

The pastor listened to the stock-broker's oration of thanks, 
holding his hands behind his back, and when the address was 
finished he presented an exorbitant bill. I must confess that it 
is my experience with foreign priests, that they have not been 
given to hospitality. 

When I visited, the year before, the colossal bronze statue 
of Daibutz at Kamakura, the ancient capital of Japan, the Eng- 
lish merchant, who had accompanied us from Yokahama, intro- 
duced me as a brother "bonze" to the priest of the Chapel 
beneath the image. 

He invited me down to inspect the sanctuary. There was 
an altar and a tabernacle above it, as in a Roman Catholic 
Church; he opened the door of the tabernacle and looked back 
at me, as he thrust in his arm, as much as to say, I'll let you see 
something not shown to every visitor. 

I expected to see a toe of Buddha, or one of the prized 
relics of his order but, drawing out his hand carefully, he pro- 
duced a bottle of Bass's pale ale. With much Japanese ceremony 
we drank each other's health and he then intimated he expected 
in return about three times its usual price ! 

To return to Iceland. After spending Sunday at the gey- 
sers, which did not perform for our diversion, we returned to the 
Capital. It was evident that Dr. Hatjlin was in no hurry to 
take me to the sulphur deposits, but I intimated my resolution 
that if he was not willing to go next morning, I would go by 
myself. 

So next morning we set off with a troop of ponies and men, 
and finally arrived at a broad valley here and there covered with 



General Inaccuracy 41 

clouds of steam. We stayed all night at a farmhouse built of 
sod and next morning sallied forth to inspect the sulphur. 

As the Doctor took a spade so did I. When he came to a 
souferole he stuck his spade near the orifice and turned up five 
or six pounds of pure sulphur, which he carefully patted back 
into its place, remarking that he was very careful of these indi- 
vidual deposits. 

It was my turn next having removed a few spadefuls of 
sulphur on the immediate surface. I dug deeper and found 
nothing but white clay. "Kaolin, a very valuable clay/' as the 
Doctor explained. I repeated my examination of a dozen other 
souferoles always with the same result. "How many souferoles 
are there in the valley?" I asked. "Eighty-seven," the Doctor 
replied, "as you will see in my report to the government." "And 
how much sulphur do you think there is in each souferole?" 
"Ah! that you cannot tell." I asked, "Is there a ton?" "Oh 
no, not a ton!" "Is there half a ton?" "You really cannot 
tell," he ventured. 

There was in reality not more than five pounds. There was 
not half a ton of sulphur in the whole valley. The nature of 
the deposit was sufficient of itself to indicate there could be no 
great quantity; for the sulphur was coming from the decom- 
position of a bed, probably iron pyrites far down beneath the 
surface; and the sulphur was escaping in the form of sulphu- 
retted hydrogen gas. 

Now water charged with this gas, will deposit its sulphur in 
the presence of light, hence the accumulation of the sulphur was 
very slow and in small quantities just at the surface. There 
were mountains in the distance with patches of white in their 
hollows. They had named them on the map, The Sulphur 
Mountains. 

I asked the Doctor if the white patches were deposits of 
sulphur. He knew if he said they were that I would have ridden 
to examine them. He therefore told the truth saying, that it 



42 Recollections and Reflections 

was that very valuable clay, kaolin. The Governor and the 
Doctor wondered what report I should make in London ; but, of 
course, I held my peace until I saw the owner of the property 
when I was pained to tell him that the valley did not contain 
half a ton of sulphur. 

This experience warned me how inaccurate men with the 
best intentions might be. And how cautious any man ought to 
be, if called upon to make a serious report, involving the expen- 
diture of much money. 

One of my instructions was to find a creek or inlet on the 
southern coast from which it might be possible to ship the sul- 
phur. The coast-cliffs being of hard basaltic-lava, it was with 
some difficulty that I found a crevasse by which to reach the 
narrow beach below and then to my astonishment, I found 
wagon-loads of broken bamboo and sugar cane which had been 
transported to Iceland by the Gulf Stream from the West Indian 
Islands. 

Here is another illustration of the disaster which may be 
occasioned by reporting inaccurately. 

Some thirty years ago, I had occasion to go twenty-five 
miles down the Platte from Greeley. To my astonishment I 
there found a deserted town of twenty or thirty houses. On the 
floor of one of them there was a pamphlet whose contents had 
evidently brought this Colony from one of the States on the 
Eastern seaboard. 

From their calling the town Jamestown it is probable that 
that was the name of the neighborhood from which they had 
come. The pamphlet represented the site of Jamestown as a 
corner of Paradise. The climate was perfection; the game was 
plentiful ; the supply of wood was ample ; fish was to be had for 
the catching ; beds of coal were quite close in the mountains and 
there was an irrigation ditch which brought water from Greeley. 

The only absolute truth in these statements was concerning 
the climate : the game was the antelope, most difficult to shoot ; 



General Inaccuracy 43 

the buffalo were fast disappearing, if they had not at that time 
all been killed. There were at certain seasons ducks and geese ; 
the fish were the suckers in the river, by no means numerous or 
palatable. The wood was a few cotton-wood trees on the island 
in the river ; the coal was certainly forty miles away ; the irriga- 
tion ditch was there, but no water had it ever brought to the 
unfortunate town. 

Disappointment and anxiety induced cancer of the stomach 
of the leader of the Colony, Colonel Pace, a man of God, whom 
I had the privilege of ministering to in his last sickness. Now 
this pamphlet was signed carelessly and thoughtlessly at the 
solicitation of some interested men by Governor Evans, the 
Governor of the then Territory and our Bishop Randall, a well 
known and revered man on the eastern seaboard. 

Can any one sum the amount of mental agony and heart- 
breaking anxiety, to say nothing of the monetary loss of these 
colonists, which is to be ascribed solely to the inaccuracy of the 
misleading statements of that pamphlet signed by two such 
reputable men and high officials? 

When the Churchmen of Denver cabled to me to draw five 
hundred dollars and revisit them and I came to investigate the 
situation I naturally sought to form some estimate of the future 
population of the city. One afternoon I had the honor of con- 
sulting Governor Evans and Bishop Spalding. 

Now, from my English point of view a Governor and a 
Bishop were two very important people. I had never spoken to 
a Governor in all my life and I had called a Bishop "My Lord," 
and looked upon him with great deference, somewhat mingled 
with awe. It could be well understood how that interview not 
a little shocked my sense of propriety. And yet I could not 
divest myself of the importance of the announcements of two 
such dignitaries. 

The Governor was whittling a piece of stick ; the Bishop, a 
large and apostolic-looking man, was rocking in a cumbrous 



44 Recollections and Reflections 

chair, smoking a cigar with his leg over one arm. I asked them 
what they considered the population of the city might possibly 
attain within a reasonable limit. The rich silver deposits of 
Leadville had just been discovered and two thousand people 
were arriving in Denver every week. 

The Bishop deferred to the Governor, who mechanically 
whittling his stick, looked up to the ceiling for inspiration. 
"Well Bishop/' said he, "we'll give her a million." "Within 
what time," I enquired, "Do you think the city may attain the 
population of a million ?" 

The Governor again deferred to the Bishop and the Bishop 
deferred to the Governor and they then both agreed that within 
twenty-five years Denver would be a city of a million souls. It 
is now some thirty-seven years since that afternoon and the city 
has not a quarter of the inhabitants they estimated. 

If the rapid increase in the population had been one of the 
elements to influence my decision, whether I should leave Lon- 
don, and come and preach the Gospel in Denver, how grievously 
might these gentlemen have misled me by what was a wholly 
unwarranted and absurd opinion. 



CHAPTER VIII. 

Illustrative of Clerical Experiences. 

The Theological course of the University of Dublin extends 
over two years, and if successful you then receive a Testimonium 
Theologicum. At Cambridge the Theological course was only 
six weeks. Before taking my degree I had attended a year's 
theological lectures, but I was full of scientific work writing, 
lecturing and teaching, and I left the University for London 
without the Theological Testimonium. On becoming settled at 
Blackheath I took as active a part in a neighboring Church as. 
the restricted rules for lay-service of the Church of England 
would permit. The Vicar, after some months begged me to be 
Ordained. I had always had my face set towards the Ministry, 
and he being quite willing to give me what is called a Title, I 
applied to the Bishop of London for Ordination. I then found 
myself against a hard and fast rule which their Lordships had 
made for their own guidance — that they would Ordain no one 
who had not concluded some Theological course at a University. 
Bishop Tait told me I must take what he called a short course 
at King's College. When I applied to the authorities of King's 
College they knew of no course except their regular course of 
two years. However, after a lapse of some months I received a 
printed notice to attend an examination at London House. I 
remember it well for the day was a public holiday — Lord Mayor's 
Day — and I very unwillingly spent it writing answers to the 
questions of the Bishop's examiners. I appeared to have satis- 
fied them and was required to present myself for a personal inter- 
view with his Lordship. The Bishop then said that as I did not 

45 



46 Recollections and Reflections 

possess the Theologicum Testimonium he could not Ordain me. 
I told him that he was aware of that fact six months previously, 
that he had then told me I must take the Short Course at King's 
College but that the authorities of that Institution had none 
such to offer. The Bishop said that he was very sorry the mis- 
take had been made but that he could not Ordain me without 
the Testimonium ; so I went back to my scientific work. 

I was now associated with Professor Drew, whose wife was 
a niece of the Bishop of Calcutta, Daniel Wilson, whose Chap- 
lain and son-in-law, Canon Bateman, was now the Vicar of 
North Cray, a charming village in Kent eight miles from Black- 
heath. The Canon heard my story. He happened to be an 
intimate friend of Archbishop Longley and was good enough to 
speak to the Archbishop of the matter of my Ordination. Co- 
lenso had just issued his book, a crude criticism of the arith- 
metic of the Pentateuch, which greatly interested Professor 
Drew. Because Colenso was Second Wrangler, Mr. Drew had 
the greatest respect for his opinion, and night after night he 
read the book to me criticizing its every line. When I presented 
myself at Addingham to the Archbishop, as he stood in his 
library, before the fire with his coat tails over his arms, he 
was astonished at my intimate knowledge of Colenso's book. 
After picking that vulnerable work to pieces to his Grace's very 
evident satisfaction, he said, "Mr. Hart, I knew and revered 
your father (when he was Bishop of Ripon my father was one 
of his Clergy) and for his sake I will break a rule that I have 
kept for thirty years, and I will Ordain you without a Divinity 
Testimonium." 

Far be from me to advocate any easy road to Ordination, 
but I cite this as an instance of the exceeding difficulty for even 
a well-qualified man to become Ordained unless he had complied 
with a hard and fast rule ; and although it works occasionally to 
the detriment of the Church it is infinitely preferable to the 



Illustrative of Clerical Experiences 47 

slip-shod, ineffective, and in more than one instance scandalous, 
process of Ordination that I have witnessed in Colorado. 

Bishop Tait made a similar exception in an instance which 
is illustrative of a singular peculiarity of the working classes. 
Blackheath is on a plateau which edges the valley of the Thames ; 
a dense population stretches for miles on either side of the river. 
We richer Clergy, as in duty bound, helped to support City 
Missionaries and other agents to ameliorate the sodden poverty 
of such crowded localities. A Mr. Courtney was one of our 
most successful Missionaries. In a saw-mill he had collected a 
congregation of five or six hundred people, to whom I occa- 
sionally preached. One Sunday night in July I wore a paper 
collar. Always being of an experimenting turn of mind, I would 
try a new invention. The saw-mill was packed to the doors. 
Four old women found seats on the platform, about my feet, 
which formed the pulpit. It was suffocatingly hot. In the 
middle of my sermon I put up my hand to feel how my collar 
was getting on, I felt strips of pulp held together by a piece of 
tape — that was the first and last time I wore a paper collar ! 

Finding this Mission was so successful a deputation of us 
Clergy waited on the Bishop of London urging him to Ordain 
Mr. Courtney and we would build him a Church. After con- 
siderable demur the sensible Scotchman acquiesced. We built a 
roomy, well-lighted, dignified Church of which Mr. Courtney 
was the first Incumbent. When I occasionally went to preach in 
it I never found a congregation of more than two hundred. 
Cleanliness, light, and fresh air were actually distasteful to that 
class of people; they would not, and did not come. 

In building a Church or Mission it is absolutely necessary 
to consider the habits and likings of the people you intend your 
building to serve. 



CHAPTEE IX. 

A Prison Experience. 

The Ordinary of Newgate was one of my Blackheath neigh- 
bors and occasionally he would ask me to take his Morning 
Service. I would present myself at Newgate a little after 10 
o'clock, and five doors would be locked behind me before I 
reached the little Vestry of the great City prison. 

Mr. Jonas, the Governor, who had never slept out of New- 
gate for thirty years, came in gently rubbing his hands : "Good 
morning, Mr. Hart, we are ready." I had heard the distant 
muffled tread of the prisoners for some time, and every now and 
then a number called by a Warder, as the tally passed him. In 
the meanwhile I had put on my surplice, and mounting a cork- 
screw iron staircase, I emerged into the reading-desk of the 
Chapel. It was a strange sight; five or six hundred prisoners 
surrounding the place, in divisions; the murderers condemned 
to be hung, in an iron cage to the right ; the men awaiting trial, 
on benches directly in front ; the women behind a red screen in 
the gallery. They were only allowed to hear their own voices 
in Service, and they took ample advantage of the privilege and 
responded with vigor. I invariably addressed them on what I 
told them I considered the most remarkable verse in the Bible. 
No doubt they considered 13 an unlucky number, I thought 
perhaps a couple of thirteens might change the luck. This 
verse was the thirteenth verse of the XHIth chapter of Leviti- 
cus, the third Book in the Bible: 

I told them that the white leprosy was a disease which God 
singled out of all other diseases to visibly illustrate the nature 




INTERIOR OF OLD ST. JOHN'S CHURCH, DENVER. 
(THE CEILTNG WAS OF SAGGING CANVAS ) 



A Prison Experience 49 

and consequences of sin; that if a pimple appeared on the skin 
the priest was called to inspect it; if it looked like leprosy and 
he was not sure, the victim was to be shut up for seven days 
and then examined again, and if the spot had spread and the 
hair on the surface had turned white, showing that the mischief 
was deeper than a superficial blemish, that then it was the 
dread disease. The sufferer was driven from the camp — the 
presence of God — he had to wear the habiliments of the dead, 
and not only was he considered dead to his family and friends, 
but he carried contamination and was compelled to cry, "Un- 
clean, Unclean," lest any should approach him unawares. All 
this drastic treatment vividly illustrated God's dealing with sin, 
for sin in its nature separates from God, the God of holiness, 
and all connected with Him. 

How then were we to understand this thirteenth verse of 
the XIHth chapter of Leviticus, which reads: "Then the 
priest shall consider; and behold, if the leprosy have covered 
all his flesh, he shall pronounce him clean that hath the plague ; 
it is all turned white ; he is clean/' 

This kind of leprosy was not contagious like small-pox, for 
Naaman, the Generalissimo of the Syrian forces was a leper, 
and on State occasions the King "leaned upon his arm," in 
procession, which he never would have done if there had been 
any fear of his catching the disease; and we read of Elisha's 
servant, Gehazi, who was "a leper as white as snow," being in the 
audience chamber of King Jehoram and mixing with the cour- 
tiers. Then why was it, that a small spot of leprosy was suffi- 
cient to ostracize a man and cast him out as dead, and yet when 
he was covered white from the sole of his foot to the crown of 
his head, so that you could run your hand over his whole body 
and find no open sore, and no "proud flesh/' that then he was 
considered ceremonially clean and could return to his tent and 
his business? 

The answer must have been an untold relief to many a 



50 Recollections and Reflections 

jailed prisoner. Here were hundreds of men and women con- 
victed before the world of sin, and most of them convicted by 
their own consciences. The heaviest of burdens was upon them ; 
how welcome must it have been to them to be told that if they 
would only confess that they were sinners, that there was no 
whole place in them, that like the Publican in the Lord's parable 
they would smite upon their breast and say, "God be merciful 
to me, a sinner," that then the white leper represented them and 
they might be assured they were clean. 

I used to walk down the corridors and look through the 
spy-holes of the cell doors, and nearly every prisoner was looking 
up in the Bible, provided for each cell, that celebrated verse, and 
I have had letters from distant parts, from men who still held 
in precious memory the hope of the white leper. 

It was a curious experience during the Assize to lunch in 
the prison with the Judge. The Lord Mayor, or one of the 
Aldermen, always sat on the Bench as the representative of the 
right of the City to administer its own laws, and his presence 
gave authority to one of Her Majesty's Judges who, in the name 
of the City, executed them. 

The City lunched the Judges. It was a mimic Lord Mayor's 
banquet. His Lordship presided in his cock-feather, three- 
cornered hat. We always had the celebrated turtle soup, "thick 
and clear," and the usual toasts were drunk; that to Her 
Majesty's health being acknowledged by the Judge in his scarlet 
and ermine, who had just condemned a murderer to be "hung 
by the neck," within a few feet of our banqueting. For some 
long-forgotten reason the toasts in Newgate were given by the 
Lord Mayor "sitting." 

I was the guest of the Ordinary who attended in his black 
silk gown, cassock and bands. Lord Mayor Besley was that 
day in the chair, and he was trying to be facetious : "Here, Mr. 
Ordinary, is some game-pie for you, you are pious, you know!" 



CHAPTER X. 
Incidents Connected with People I Have Known. 

There were in my congregation at Blackheath, three sisters. 
The eldest, Miss Roberts, was 96; Mrs. Withcombe, 86; and 
Mrs. Pettman, 84. They were the daughters of Captain Cook's 
sailing master, Captain Roberts, who was with Cook when he 
was killed at Hawaii. He discovered the Sandwich Islands and 
named them after the First Lord of the Admiralty. In one of 
their rooms there hung a splendid three-quarter length portrait 
of their father, which was painted by Gainsborough by command 
of the King. 

One day Mrs. Withcombe asked me to take a water-color 
hanging in the drawing-room, which she said she could see no 
longer. She had bought it on her wedding-trip in Scotland of 
a young painter. His name, Copley-Fielding, afterwards became 
famous, and I sold the picture for $5,000. It seems a long 
stretch of years to be able to say I knew the daughters of a man 
who saw Captain Cook — the first circumnavigator of the world 
— killed. What unbelievable changes have taken place in the 
times spanned by such a memory. 

But the most extraordinary stretch of years I read of one day 
in the Times. A will case was being tried and a very old 
lady was a witness. When the counsel asked her, "Had you ever 
a brother or sister?" she replied, "Yes, I had a sister who was 
buried 150 years ago." That almost unbelievable statement 
occurred thus: Her father was married when he was nineteen; 
the next year they had a baby girl who died in a few months. 
Her father having become a widower married again when he 

51 



52 Recollections and Reflections 

was 75, and the witness was then 94, which made it 150 years 
since her sister was buried. 

Dr. Claughton, the Bishop of Rochester, was my Bishop 
until he retired. He had a higher opinion of me than I de- 
served. He asked me to become his Diocesan Inspector of 
Schools, wishing very properly to know the status of the Schools 
in the Diocese managed by the Clergy. One of his senior Clergy, 
who had no School of his own, had made an academic study of 
Religious Education, and by perseverance had contrived to make 
himself a recognized authority on that subject. No position he 
coveted more, or thought himself more capable of filling than the 
position the Bishop had asked me to fill, but when he spoke he 
gobbled like a turkey-cock, which really unfitted him for exam- 
ining children. But his amour-propre was so offended by what 
he considered was the undue exaltation of one of the junior 
Clergy that he stirred up no little commotion in the Diocese, 
which reached the Bishop's ears. I ventured to ask his Lord- 
ship to allow me to resign in the interests of peace — which he 
did — but he never filled the appointment. Thus early I was 
the victim of that Clerical jealousy, which I estimate from the 
observation of a long life, more impedes the usefulness of the 
Church than any other frailty of human nature. 

The great Duke of Argyle married for his third wife a 
daughter of the Bishop. On one of my visits to England I went 
to see his Lordship in his retirement. The Duke was sitting in 
a tent pitched in the Park. As everybody knows, he had a quick, 
intelligent mind, always on the alert for information, 

He questioned me long of our American affairs, and on re- 
turning to this Country I had many letters from him discussing 
social problems as they presented themselves on this side the 
Atlantic. 

A lady, whom I, of course, knew to be the Duchess, was 
being pushed about in a wicker chair, by a footman. In that 
class of Society one is supposed to know all the visitors in the 



Incidents Connected with People I Have Known 53 

house, so no introduction is necessary, and I was soon in conver- 
sation with one of the handsomest of women — the first lady in 
Scotland. Presently she opened a silver box, struck a match, 
lit some fudge and inhaled the fumes. "What," I said, "Your 
Grace, Asthma?" She looked at me with a sort of strained 
contentment, "Yes, I haven't been in bed for three years." 
What a parody on rank and beauty ! She would have changed 
places with the footman's wife, who had slept soundly all last 
night, and never thanked her Creator for bestowing upon her 
His "beloved sleep." 

Two of Lord Fitzwilliam's sons, who were intent on be- 
coming soldiers, came to me to prepare for the Army examina- 
tion. They were kind enough during the Christmas holidays to 
ask me down in the hunting season, to their Yorkshire seat, 
Wentworth Woodhouse. It was five miles from the Park gates 
to the Mansion, whose facade was a quarter of a mile long. 
They all had their early breakfast in their rooms, but as I have 
had the habit all my life long of rising at five o'clock, I was 
strolling in the stable yard before the ten o'clock breakfast. The 
head groom asked me if I would like to see the horses, and 
placing me at a certain spot, he blew a whistle and the stable 
boys opened the doors, and I looked down a vista and saw the 
tails of sixty-five hunters. 

In the plate-room was silver and gold-plate, which had 
come down in the family and been augmented by succeeding 
generations. I understood they could dine one hundred and 
twenty, and everything on the table was gold; yet here was 
genuine simplicity, and the art of life was reduced to its very 
easiest methods. You had only to express a wish and it was 
gratified — for instance, at the breakfast table you proposed to 
join any of the parties then being discussed, the man behind 
your chair gave such directions that everything requisite for 
that diversion was ready at the right time and place. The 
servants for long generations had been trained for their work 



54 Recollections and Reflections 

and nothing could be quieter or more orderly than the move- 
ments of such a household, and yet without a symptom of osten- 
tation and in an atmosphere of kindness and thoughtfulness for 
other people. 

The procedure worked curiously but effectively. On Satur- 
day afternoon, when young Fitzwilliam went to Town to spend 
Sunday, he would leave my house for the railway station, with 
his umbrella under his arm, followed by George, his valet, with 
a portmanteau. His master would get into the train, he into a 
second-class carriage lower down. At every station George's 
head was out of the window to see if his master should alight. 
When they arrived at Cannon Street Station, and Fitzwilliam 
took a cab, George took another and followed him, and you may 
be very sure that wherever his master slept that night there was 
everything to his hand as if he had given fifty orders. 

One day, Mr. Petter, the publisher, asked me to have a day's 
shooting in Surrey, where some London men kept a preserve, 
he said, "Would Mr. Fitzwilliam like to come too?" I gave 
him the invitation and he said he thought he would like to go. 
It was Friday afternoon; I heard his bell ring and George 
appeared; he said, "George, I shall need my gun." That is all 
he said. George went down to Yorkshire, and on Monday morn- 
ing there was the gun with a box of cartridges. 

After this War there will be no such experiences as we had 
that day. Five or six hundred pheasants and three or four 
hundred hares were killed by twenty guns, and you could see 
St. Paul's Cathedral nine miles on the horizon. There will be 
no such game preserving, defended by laws made by the game 
preservers themselves, in future; this War will democratize the 
population and do much to level class distinction and do away 
with privileges conserved by the few to the exclusion of the 
many. 

The most notable case of Absolutism I ever knew, was told 
me by General Maclean, who was once the Military Instructor 



Incidents Connected with People I Have Known 55 

to the son of the Khedive of Egypt. The General was dining at 
the Palace, the British Ambassador was present. The conversa- 
tion turned on Hippopotami, and his Highness asked the Ambas- 
sador if Her Majesty possessed a Hippo. On being informed 
that there had never been one seen in England he turned to the 
Officer behind his chair and said: "Get me a Hippopotamus," 
and that was all he said. To obey that one sentence half a regi- 
ment of soldiers was dispatched up the Nile to Nubia; a young 
Hippo was secured and a special dahabieh was built with a tank 
in the middle. Bands of soldiers were sent on either side of the 
river, who drove all the cows down to the river's brink, so that 
the animal might be supplied with fresh milk. When they 
arrived at Cairo the Officer reported at the palace that the Hippo 
was there, and the Khedive ordered it to be given to Her Majesty 
through the Ambassador. A tank had to be prepared on a man- 
of-war, and a number of cows shipped to provide milk for it ; and 
I saw that hippopotamus on my first visit to London at the 
great Exhibition in Sir John Paxton's Glass House, in Hyde 
Park, in 1851. 

To return for a moment to the Hon. John Fitzwilliam. He 
entered Parliament as the Member for Peterborough; and one 
day riding home from the Hunt, in the Park close to the house, 
his horse put its foot into a rabbit-hole, threw him over its head, 
and broke his neck. Lady Fitzwilliam sent me a steel-engraving 
of him which hangs in my dining room side by side with that of 
Longley, the Archbishop — two Christian gentlemen, the finest 
fabric of human nature. 

Another man, whose memory I love to cherish, is Mr. Bond, 
the Curator of the Manuscripts in the British Museum — where 
he lived. Mrs. Bond was the daughter of the Rev. Richard 
Harris Barham, the author of the celebrated Ingoldsby Legends. 
Their son Teddy was at my school. He went to Rugby, caught 
scarlet-fever, and died. He was the dearest of boys^ and of all 
the kind things, which have been said of me by my friends, I 



56 Recollections and Reflections 

value most Teddy's delirious saying, as he was dying, "Three 
cheers for Mr. Hart." 

Mr. Bond was Knighted, but died the day after he received 
his Patent, so that he was really Sir Edward for one single day. 
I write this memory of him chiefly to hand down an opinion of 
his worth knowing to Biblical scholars. 

One day I was walking with him in the King's Library, 
when he stopped before a glass bookcase, whose door he opened 
with a key, and taking one of four volumes, luxuriously bound, 
he put it into my hand. It was the Codex Alexandrinus, one of 
the five oldest copies of the Bible we possess — the Codex A. It 
was beautifully engrossed on vellum pages. I asked him what he 
thought was the origin of that venerable book? His reply is 
worth recording, for what he believed about a book was probably 
correct. He said, "Eusebius tells us that the Emperor Constan- 
tine required fifty Bibles to be procured for the fifty Churches 
in Constantinople, and I believe this is one of them." Now, 
remembering that the Empress Helena, Constantine's mother, 
was a great and generous patron of Christianity, there is little 
doubt but that she would command the loan of the autographs 
of the Apostles if they were to be had. These parchments would 
then be only about two hundred and eighty years old — a small 
age in comparison to the fifteen hundred and fifty years of the 
Codex itself — and therefore the opinion Dean Burgon so firmly 
held of the reputation of Codex A — that it was the most reliable 
copy of the Bible we possess, far superior to the Sinaiaticus, or 
the Vaticanus, which he considered vitiated copies, is probably 
correct. 

Dr. Richard Garnett, who was the Director of the Reading 
Room of the British Museum, was a connection of mine. I spent 
a whole Monday once in his office which I remember vividly. 
The previous day, Sunday, I had spent at Southchurch, 
which was the best living in the Archbishop's gift and 
where Canon Bateman retired to end his days. I found my old 



Incidents Connected with People I Have Known 57 

Vicar shrivelled in body, but with his temper as violent as ever. 
I sometimes wonder if temper is the thermometer of Christian 
love — if it be, the love of many I have known must have grown 
cold. We condone temper as the vice of the virtuous, but of all 
the disabilities of Saintship there is no sin that so spots the 
white robe of the Christian with murkier splatches, than temper ; 
it poisons the atmosphere of the home, it rubs the bloom off 
childhood, and it curdles the milk of human kindness, more 
certainly than any of those sins which Society contemns. 

I found visiting the Vicarage a most attractive and intel- 
ligent lady, who had some relationship with the Wilson family. 
I did not know it at the time, but I afterwards learned that she 
occupied the proud position of the most popular palmist in Lon- 
don, when palmistry was the vogue. It is unnecessary to say 
that the conversation drifted to matters occult, and she won- 
dered that I had never heard the celebrated ghost story con- 
nected with Bishop Wilberforce. She said that the Bishop was 
staying at the country seat of Lord Wilton; that one evening 
as the dinner procession was passing through the hall to the 
dining room, the Bishop saw a Roman Priest watching the com- 
pany. During dinner the Bishop asked his host who the Priest 
was. His Lordship said that he had no knowledge of any Priest 
in the house, but the Bishop declared that he had just seen him 
standing there. The footman was sent to make a search, but he 
returned, like Elijah's attendant, saying there was nothing. The 
next morning the Bishop was writing letters, and looking up, 
there was the Priest standing before him. "Sir, what are you 
doing here ?" said the Bishop, "Lord Wilton is unaware of your 
presence"; when the Priest replied, "I was once the Chaplain 
in this house ; I heard the confession of a young lady, and wrote 
it down. I then went out, and that day was accidently killed. 
You will find the manuscript where I put it — in the third book 
on the third shelf from the fireplace, in the library — you will 
give me rest if you will find it and destroy it unread." To 



58 Recollections and Reflections 

which simple request the Bishop at once agreed. He found the 
manuscript where the apparation had indicated and threw it 
into the fire. 

I asked my lady friend how she knew that this narrative 
was true. "Oh," she said, "you'll find it in the Bishop's life." 
Going up to London, I called on Dick Garnett (we had been 
boys together) and sat in his private office all day searching the 
lives, not only of the Bishop, but of his celebrated father, 
William Wilberforce; there was no such story narrated. I 
afterwards was told that the interesting Bishop had "made it 
up" to please a party of children, but for the truth of that, or 
of any other story beyond my personal observation, I should be 
sorry to vouch. This story may have been no more true than 
another which was current in my day, that the Bishop had said 
to Prince Albert, that if his brother-in-law, Archdeacon Man- 
ning, had been made a Bishop he would never have perverted to 
Rome — so Rome would have lost an astute Cardinal, who very 
nearly became Pope in spite of the politicians of the Vatican, 
who feared him. 

Another great man with whom I was privileged to come 
into contact was Archbishop Whately. Always being inclined 
to be occupied, I was one of a few undergraduates who "ran" a 
Ragged-School and a Penny Bank in Fishamble Street, in 
Dublin ; and for some time I played the harmonium in the Irish 
Church Missions Church in Townsend Street. In these activi- 
ties I became associated with a coterie of remarkable women, 
and I have since recognized the truth of the opinion of critics, 
more authoritative than myself, that there is no Society of the 
world more charming than the elite of Dublin. The most dis- 
tinguished of these ladies was Miss Mary Whately. She seemed 
to know the Greek Testament by heart. Her father appealed to 
her sometimes, "Mary, what is the reading there ?" and without 
hesitation she would give the quotation to his Grace. She had 
an excellent voice, and was a musician of no mean calibre. To 



Incidents Connected with People I Have Known 59 

hear her sing "I Know That My Redeemer Liveth" was a thing 
to be remembered. Occasionally I would listen to the conver- 
sation of the Archbishop, and I once heard him say what I have 
often repeated in the pulpit as the authoritative dictum of a 
great logician, that "there is more evidence for the Resurrection 
of Jesus Christ than there is for the existence of Julius Caesar." 

Speaking of "I Know That My Redeemer Liveth" reminds 
me of the singing of it by Jenny Lind. I heard her at Brad- 
ford, the week that the Prince Consort died. She was supported 
by Madam Stainton-Dolby, Sims Reeves, and Santley. Costa 
was conducting, and a chorus of seven hundred, of probably the 
best chorus singers in the world ; for it is generally credited that 
the West Riding is the most musical of neighborhoods. I have 
often seen in the schoolroom at Otley, a Madrigal Society — the 
men, in their smock-frocks, from the mills, and some of the 
women who "minded" the looms — sing a Madrigal correctly at 
sight, with accidentals scattered through it as thick as black- 
berries. 

I read in Sims Reeves' "Musical Career" that the company 
hesitated whether they should give "The Messiah" when Prince 
Albert was lying dead, but finally, considering the nature of the 
oratorio, the concert was given. Jenny Lind was dressed in 
simple black, without a jewel. I have never heard a voice since 
equal to the purity of hers; every note dropped from her mouth 
as a liquid pearl. When she sang "I Know That My Redeemer 
Liveth" she stood looking into space, motionless, and the impres- 
sion produced upon every one in that vast audience was, that 
you would give everything you possessed if you could be as sure 
that your Redeemer lived, as was the great cantatrice. 

Dr. Anthony Thorold, when he was Bishop of Rochester, 
and again when he was Bishop of Winchester, in his travels 
came out to see me. Let it not be understood that he came from 
England on purpose, but he was very fond of traveling in what 
might be called his vacation, and in his wanderings twice hon- 



60 Recollections and Reflections 

ored us with a visit to Denver. He preached in the Cathedral to 
an overflowing congregation. He was greatly pleased at the 
reception he received. I mention him chiefly because he is an 
illustration of what methodical work can accomplish. 

I visited him at Selden Park. He was then the Chaplain 
of the House of Lords. He was continually out in his Diocese, 
confirming, speaking and preaching, and was on several National 
Committees. I one day looked over his letter-book, a long book 
ruled in five compartments — he recorded when the letter was 
received, from whom, the gist of what it was about, when it was 
answered, and how. It was then September, and since the begin- 
ning of the year he had written 3,020 letters — more than an 
average of eleven a day — and yet he was of such a delicate con- 
stitution that if his food was not more than warm he was seri- 
ously ill. He was an illustration of what a man with a frail 
body can do with care and method. He was not a great man, 
but he was a good man, and his memory leaves a pleasant taste 
in one's mouth. 

Canon T. Teignmouth Shore was a college friend of mine 
and remained so till the end of his life. He is an illustration of 
what consummate tact is capable of accomplishing. After occu- 
pying one or two small Churches, he came into the employ of 
Cassell, Petter and Galpin. He was the Editor of "The 
Quiver"; and to him we owe Ellicot's "Commentary of the 
Bible" and Farrar's "Life of Christ." He became the Incum- 
bent of Berkeley Chapel, Mayfair, and the children of the then 
Prince of Wales and a great many of the aristocracy were 
attracted to his Children's Services. Mr. Shore was chosen 
to give the Princesses their spiritual instruction. He thus 
became, I may almost say, intimate with the Royal Family, and 
when the Princess Alice became Duchess of Hesse, her faith 
was seriously upset by that German Higher Criticism which so 
fiercely attacked the probity of the Bible. A volume of Shore's 
sermons on "Some Difficulties of Belief" was put into her hands, 



Incidents Connected with People I Have Known 61 

I believe by her mother, the Queen, and through God's mercy 
was the means of re-establishing her belief in the promises of 
God, and she regained the sure anchorage just before her tragic 
death. 

He was present at the deathbed of the Empress Frederick, 
and just before she passed away he told me a butterfly flew in 
at the open window, settled a moment on her breast, and then 
flew out again. They all took it for a sign. 

In recognition of his services the Crown gave him a 
Canonry of Worcester, where he died. Mrs. Shore, who still 
survives him, was the daughter of a Mr. Waller, a Dublin bar- 
rister, who had some reputation as a poet. I chiefly remember 
him as introducing Lord Brougham to an Irish audience. The 
great Chancellor was then a very old man and tried to get out 
of making a speech, but Mr. Waller, by adroit Irish cleverness, 
held him to his intention, and we had the pleasure of listening 
to a short address. His Lordship had on those Scotch breeches 
in which he always appeared, for it is said that when once visit- 
ing in Scotland he ordered a pair of trousers of the village 
tailor which so exactly suited him that he wrote commissioning 
the tailor to make him seven pairs, but he wrote so badly that 
the tailor read seventy for seven, and filled the order ! 

Barristers were never noted for their legible writing. One 
noted K. C. had three hands; one he could read and his clerk 
couldn't, another which his clerk could read and he couldn't, and 
a third which neither of them could read. 

The late Bishop Doane's writing was also illegible to ordi- 
nary people. I have seen Bishop Spalding receive a letter from 
Albany which he was unable to decipher, and he had to send it 
to the late Mr. Pott, the publisher, who returned it with the 
illegible words translated. 

Speaking of Bishop Doane, I heard in England an interest- 
ing fact concerning his father, the first Bishop Doane. He came 
over to England when the visits of American Bishops were rare, 



62 Recollections and Reflections 

and he preached for my father's friend, Dr. Hook, the Vicar of 
Leeds. He preached on Baptism, to a magnificent congregation, 
in the great Parish Church. When they returned to the Vestry, 
Dr. Hook said, "A very interesting sermon, Bishop, but I sup- 
pose there was not one single person in that congregation who 
has not been baptized." But there was one. A boy of seventeen 
had been attracted by the novelty of hearing an American 
Bishop; that sermon convinced him, and he offered himself for 
baptism, and he afterwards became a clergyman and the author 
of many valuable books. He was Prebendary Sadler. 

Otley was only ten miles from Leeds, and Dr. Hook would 
occasionally come over to visit my father. As the Vicarage was 
full of children, distinguished visitors would be billeted on some 
rich parishioner. Dr. Hook was the guest of one of them. The 
little daughter of the house, as is often the custom, came into 
the drawing room for the half hour before dinner. When she 
saw Dr. Hook, who called her to him, she said, with the naivete 
of a child, "I have seen you before; I have your photograph in 
my album." "Run and fetch it," said the Doctor, "let me see 
it"; and the child soon returned triumphant with the latest 
photograph of the chimpanzee — to which human animal he was 
not unlike. 

But he was a dear man. When he was Dean of Chichester, 
Mr. Gladstone offered him the Archbishopric of Canterbury, and 
he declined the highest honor in the English Church because he 
thought the climate of Lambeth might be fatal to his wife. 

Another noted visitor, the Rev. Charles Clayton, a Fellow 
of Caius, was billeted at the same house. He had a magnificent 
head, quite bald except for a fringe of dark hair. The same 
enfant terrible came in before dinner, and looking at the great 
man, she said, "You've left your 'air in your 'at." 

Mr. Hankin, the Vicar of S. Jude's, Islington, a connection 
of mine, once told me he had a parishioner who had a long time 
been declining in health. When she came in sight of the end, 



Incidents Connected with People I Have Known 63 

he said to her one day, "Now Sarah, is there anything I can get 
for you or do for you?" "Well, Vicar," she replied, "if you'd 
be so kind, Fd like a 'at." "Why, Sarah," the Vicar said, "what 
do you want a hat for; in all probability, in a day or two you'll 
be in a world where they don't want such things?" "But, 
Vicar," Sarah said, "I read in the Bible, 'they go in there 'at.' " 

After all, the only thing of value in life is the making of 
friends. Material supply which ministers to bodily comfort is 
a long way from satisfying the whole of man. We need the 
friendship of our Creator. As Augustine well said, "Thou hast 
made us for Thyself, and our hearts find no rest until they rest 
in Thee." 

This craving after friendship has its roots in this life. A 
friend is a rare boon. People have many acquaintances, but 
friends are few. 

My Churchwarden, Edward Pembroke, was a friend. He 
was one of those men who have contributed to that robust Eng- 
lish character which has made the country what it is. Begin- 
ning as an office boy in one of the great shipping firms, he rose 
to be a ship owner himself, and when he died at eighty-one, he 
had made for himself "a name and a place" in the City of Lon- 
don men envied. He had that advantageous grace — the grace 
of perseverance. He was never weary of well doing. He had 
engineered the finances of St. Germans Chapel for all the years 
I knew him. A dear old gentleman of the Simeon type had 
been its Incumbent for many years, but as age came upon him 
he lost his hold, and his mind took to straying — indeed he 
became foolish. I remember him telling me that in a summer 
stroll he had been caught in a shower ; a rainbow bent its colored 
archway close before him, so close, he said, that he ran into it, and 
"the colors were all down my legs." He used to visit in great 
houses, and finding a shower-bath in his bedroom, he determined 
to have a bath. He got within the curtains and pulled the 
string. "Down came a torrent of cold water. I was in agony. 



64 Recollections and Reflections 

I shouted for someone to come and rescue me. It was horrible." 
"Why did yon not step out, sir?" I suggested. "Ah, I never 
thought of that," he said. 

It is needless to say that the congregation dwindled until 
it was evident "something must be done," and I was persuaded 
to become his co-worker. I have three times in my life found 
myself in that most difficult of positions, where my Senior and 
Superior was less popular than the young and virile Assistant. 
It is an unfortunate condition and arouses many searchings of 
heart. It was inevitable that, as the contrast between the old 
and the young deepened, friction should make the wheels of life 
go heavily, and jealousy heated the bearings. I have applauded 
the honesty of Kectors I have known who declined the assistance 
of Curates who were likely to overshadow them. It needs a St. 
John the Baptist to say with genuine delight, "He must increase, 
but I must decrease." It requires a rare Christianty to be able 
to sink one's own importance for the good of the people com- 
mitted to one's charge. To see a full congregation when the 
Curate is known to preach, and rows of empty pews when the 
Rector mounts the Pulpit, is more than ordinary human nature 
will bear. The genial spirit of my friend, Pembroke, was the 
oil on that troubled water, and his nautical skill kept the craft 
steady in a very choppy sea. 

In after life, in a similar difficulty, I sorely missed his 
splendid steering. 

But his "stickingatedness" was his "long suite." He sent 
me a London World, directed by his own hand, every week 
for thirty years! To have ordered the paper to be sent to me 
would have been a very friendly act, or even to have commis- 
sioned one of his clerks to have dispatched it, but to wrap it up 
himself and direct it weekly for thirty long years is a record 
very few friends can match. 

Of course, such a man had many remarkable experiences to 
relate; one, at least, is worth recording: 




XAVE OF OLD CATHEDRAL. 



Incidents Connected with People I Have Known 65 

Most people know how very sensitive is tea — how it has the 
knack of taking on the flavor of whatever has a scent in its 
neighborhood. Tea brought by ship is said to be "sea-sick" and 
has a flavor well known to tea-tasters. This is the reason why 
tea in Eussia is of a better quality than elsewhere in Europe, 
because it is brought by caravan overland, and it is the reason 
why cargoes of tea are still brought preferably in sailing ves- 
sels — Al clippers, as they were called. 

Mr. Pembroke owned some of these tea-carriers. One of 
them arrived safely with its cargo, which was duly delivered to 
its owners. A few days after the owners called on Mr. Pem- 
broke, and said the whole of the tea was spoiled, for it had a 
flavor of port wine. Mr. Pembroke sent for the skipper and 
asked him if he had any port wine on board. He replied that 
he had a quarter cask, which was unsaleable in Shanghai, and 
he was asked to take it back to London ; he had buried it in the 
ballast and delivered it to the consignee intact. Pembroke 
thought the tea merchants had heard of this and, as we say over 
here, "had put up a job on him," for it seemed incredible that 
so much of the cenanthic ether could have made its way through 
the wood of the cask and then permeated through the lead cov- 
ering of the tea so as to have flavored the whole cargo. To have 
an independent opinion, he took some of the damaged tea to a 
tea-taster in Mincing Lane, who was well known to him. The 
expert tasted the tea, said it was Chop 1, but he said, "Pem- 
broke, there is a taste of port wine about this tea"; and there 
was, and the ship owner had to pay something over £3,000 dam- 
ages. The merchants then advertised the tea as a special quality 
and put a high price on their deteriorated cargo ! 

Dear Pembroke went to the Plome of the Blessed three years 
ago, leaving an ample provision for his nine children. 

The Junior Churchwarden at St. Germans was no less 
notorious, but alas ! in the opposite direction. He was the 
Vestry Clerk of Greenwich, Vestries in those days did the work 



66 Recollections and Reflections 

now attended to by County Councils — they regulated all civic 
matters — so that the public funds which they handled in great 
boroughs were enormous. When our Junior Churchwarden was 
cut off in the midst of his days by typhoid fever, his books 
showed a deficit of £86,000. I never think of his happy home 
and lavish table without a streak of sickening conscience. His 
three sons were boys at my school. The eldest had become a 
lawyer, but his father's defalcations in some way inculpated 
him. Now here is shown the great difference between an Eng- 
lishman and an American. An Englishman is like a cat with 
one trick, and one trick only; that one thing he usually does 
well and thoroughly, but should any fatality throw him off the 
line, he has little initiative or resource to make a success in any 
other direction. 

When the young lawyer found himself deterred from prac- 
tising his profession he was at his wits' end to provide for him- 
self and his wife — they had no children — and he actually became 
a day laborer. Now, however willing he might have been, like 
the unjust steward, he "had not strength to dig" — muscles 
require educating as well as brains — and one day, carrying a hod 
of bricks up a steep ladder, his strength failed him and he fell 
from the height and was killed. Of course, I never heard of 
the tragedy until years after it occurred. 

When I first came to Denver I was one day called upon by 
a gentleman with white hair. He said there was money to be 
made by establishing in Denver a soap and candle factory, point- 
ing out that as matters then stood, the fat of slaughtered beasts 
had to be sent East and then returned as a manufactured article. 
By making the soap and candles in Denver the heavy freightage 
would be saved. He had no doubt that I had many English 
friends who would like to invest some money in such a profit- 
able venture. He was anxious to take the management of the 
concern. I asked him what experience he had had? He 
admitted that he had had none, but he was confident that he 



Incidents Connected with People I Have Known 67 

could make the manufactory a success. No Englishman would 
ever have made such a proposition, but the self-confidence of 
the versatile American would at least have made the attempt. 

Dr. Robertson, the Chancellor of the Diocese of Rochester, 
was one of my neighbors. Through him I was made a Surro- 
gate — the official to issue marriage licenses. On one occasion 
I was the Archbishop's Official for granting a Special License 
for the rare event of solemnizing a marriage in a private house. 
Of course, there were circumstances which influenced his Grace 
in issuing the license, and it was the only instance of the privi- 
lege which has ever come under my personal notice. 

In endeavoring to help one of the Chancellor's sons in a 
scientific matter, I was brought into contact with Dr. Percy, 
whose great book on Iron was then an authority. He was the 
Director of the Ventilation of the House of Commons. One 
day he took me down into what we should ecclesiastically call 
the Crypt of the Houses of Parliament. The suction of the air 
was produced, as it used to be in mines, by a fire at the bottom 
of the Victoria Tower, which caused an up-draft so that the 
used air was continually and gently drawn out of the House at 
such a pace as not to produce a draft. Walking along a corri- 
dor we came to some roughish-looking wooden steps enclosed 
with whitewashed boards, a door closing the stairway. The 
Doctor, who was an unusually tall man, took a key out of his 
waistcoat pocket and opened the door. Looking at me for a 
moment, and putting his finger on his lips, he began to ascend, 
and following him I found myself under the grating which sup- 
ported Her Majesty's Ministers. There were two chairs on 
which we sat, and I could have touched the sole of Mr. Glad- 
stone's foot as he was speaking. Shortly after, Mr. Balfour, who 
was then the young man of the Ministry, made a short address, 
when the great man of science leaned over to me and said: 
"Mr. Hart, what stuff these Ministers do talk." 

Of course I have known some great preachers. Canon 



68 Recollections and Reflections 

Miller, when he was Vicar of Greenwich, I have often listened 
to for an hour and a half, and the time seemed no longer thao 
an ordinary sermon. He was not what yon would call an elo- 
quent man, but he had a singular capability of making you think 
that he was dealing with a very abstruse subject which you 
were readily and clearly understanding, and you were so pleased 
with the performance of your own mind that you sat, if not 
entranced, at any rate in a state of pleasurable excitement. He 
always commanded enormous congregations, but he lacked 
organization, so that when he went "the way of all flesh" his 
successor told me that he could only find one old woman who 
showed any signs of the fruit of his Ministry. 

A very different story could have been told of him in his 
younger days, when he was the Rector of St. Martin's, Birming- 
ham, and saved the city from panic as he managed the affairs 
of the great bank whose failure almost ruined the community. 

I cannot say that Liddon's sermons moved me; they were 
too academic. Of course, as literary compositions filled with 
theological lore they were masterpieces, but they were lacking in 
pathos; but this lack was probably due to the great area of St. 
Paul's — you cannot lower or soften the voice when preaching to 
ten thousand people. 

The man to whom I owe more as a sermonizer is James 
Vatjghan of Brighton. 

The Rev. James Vaughan, of Christ Church, Brighton, 
was a man of small stature, and when I knew him he must 
have been half a century old. He had about the worst possible 
delivery as a preacher, completely impassioned in his style and 
with such faulty pronunciation that unless you listened with 
great care, and were somewhat familiar with his voice, you 
could barely understand him. 

The service was of the plainest, and for years there was 
no organ. And yet his was the only church in which I have 
stood in the aisle throughout the whole service, unable to find 



Incidents Connected with People I Have Known 69 

a seat. His power lay in his deep spirituality, his profound 
knowledge of the meaning of the Word of God, and the sim- 
plicity of its application to every-day life. 

There was a printer in Brighton named Yerrall, who took 
down everything Mr. Yaughan said in short hand and pub- 
lished it. He was powerless to prevent the injustice, for the 
law, as it then stood, considered the sermon public property; 
and you could only prevent such piracy by having it printed 
before it was delivered and entered at Stationers' Hall. When 
it is remembered that Mr. Yaughan had taken a first class at 
Oxford, it is a guarantee that his knowledge was accurate and 
his treatment logical. 

If ever there was an illustration of Samson's proverb, "Out 
of the eater came forth meat/' Mr. Yerrall's piratic dissemina- 
tion of Yaughan's sermons is the most apt. Thousands of 
clergymen all over England were vastly benefited, and not a 
few of them reproduced his sermons intact, which was especially 
laudable in lay-readers, who are forbidden to preach their own 
discourses. I have six volumes of "The American and Anglican 
Pulpit Library," published by Pott, of New York, which con- 
tains sermons for every Sunday in the year, and there are one 
hundred and sixty of Yaughan's in the collection. 

Spurgeon I heard first when he was a mere boy at Brad- 
ford. He had already a great reputation. It is difficult to 
account entirely for his extraordinary popularity. His appear- 
ance was commonplace, and even vulgar. You cannot say he 
was eloquent. His language was the language of Pilgrim's 
Progress, the best and purest English. There was not the 
slightest difficulty in understanding what he meant. You felt 
as if he were addressing you personally, and you only. His 
great words were those of John Wesley, "You and now." 
Monckton Mimes' criticism probably reveals the secret of his 
success. He said, after listening to one of Spurgeon's sermons 



70 Recollections and Reflections 

at the Tabernacle, "He came up a hair-dresser's assistant, he 
went down an inspired apostle." 

Inadvertently, I owe him a considerable debt. The Thurs- 
day night before the Archbishop's examination for my ordina- 
tion I went to the Tabernacle to hear the great preacher. You 
had to be there before the doors were opened to secure a good 
seat. 

As I was standing in the crowd someone said, "Mr. Spurgeon 
is not here tonight." "Then," said I, "I am going home," 
when an elderly lady just before me, turned and said, "You 
will hear a good man, sir, and I will give you a seat in my pew." 

And, fortunately, I accepted her invitation. For a vener- 
able Baptist minister preached on the text, "Let me go and 
bury my father," and the Lord's rejoinder, "Let the dead bury 
their dead"; which he said were two Oriental proverbs, which 
meant, of course, "I have a very particular piece of business 
to attend to." And the answering proverb, "See to that which is 
alive and pressing first." 

When the papers were put before us by the Archbishop's 
examining Chaplain, the very first question was to explain these 
two texts. As I had never seen so satisfactory an explana- 
tion in any commentary, I should have been unable to answer, 
had I not heard the Baptist minister on the previous Thurs- 
day night. 

Mr. Moody was not unlike Mr. Spurgeon in some par- 
ticulars. He had a direct mode of personal application which 
every successful preacher must possess. And he had inspiration, 
which every body who knows his life remembers that his popu- 
larity and influence counted from the day he obtained it. 

He once told me an instance, which illustrates and confirms 
the power of Inspiration. On his first visit to Edinburgh, 
toward the end of his address, which was on The Power of the 
Holy Spirit, a power which, he said, could be possessed by any 
one who persistently asked for it, and to the shame of so many 



Incidents Connected with People I Have Known 71 

ministers, be it said, it is not more frequently obtained, he saw 
a Scotch clergyman rise from the middle of the audience and 
go out. For the moment he was disturbed, wondering what he 
had said which had hurt the prejudices of his Scotch audience. 

Four days afterwards he saw the same clergyman come back 
to the same place and he noticed a distinct change in his appear- 
ance. After the service he came to Mr. Moody in the ante- 
room and told him that when he said, that it was the promise 
of God to give the Holy Spirit to any desiring soul who per- 
sistently asked for Him, he determined that he would have the 
great possession, and he shut himself up in the study for three 
days and had been indued with the power from on high. 

He was the minister of one of the churches in Edinburgh. 
But the change which had come over him was soon recognized 
by his congregation. People were drawn to that church in 
crowds, and although he preached his old sermons, standing 
room could only be obtained so many ''pressed upon him to hear 
the Word of God," for he now spake with power. 

Mr. Moody was one of those rare men to whom you are 
attracted by actual love. He has gone to a rich reward, and 
being dead, he yet speaks through the thousands of ministers 
and missionaries who have been trained in the schools and insti- 
tute which he founded and which bear his name. 

I should like to record an experience which tends to em- 
phasize the fact, that conversion generally requires a distinct 
act of the will, accompanied and emphasized by some bodily 
act. It may be even a trivial movement, but such appears 
necessary to rivet the determination and give it vital force. 
In the case of the Presbyterian clergyman just related, it was 
the act of leaving the meeting and locking himself in his study. 

When Torrey and Alexander held a series of meetings in 
the Albert Hall, London, the Morning Post gave an excellent 
report of the proceedings. The paper was highly laudatory and 
had only one criticism to make; it considered it a flaw upon 



72 Recollections and Reflections 

an otherwise admirable presentation of the Gospel that Dr. 
Torrey at the end of his address, invited all such as had deter- 
mined to give themselves to Christ, to stand up and come down 
to the front. 

The reporter said that this was theatrical and unworthy 
of the dignity of the subject and it marred its excellent presenta- 
tion. The next day the Rev. W. Hay Aitken, the well known 
missioner, wrote a letter to the paper in which he said he had 
been five years a Canon of Norwich, and that during his three 
months' residence he had preached to the Nave of the Cathedral 
full of people; he had preached the same sermons he was ac- 
customed to preach in his missions, and as far as he knew, they 
had been wholly without effect. 

Whereas, at the moment, he was holding a mission at Swan- 
sea and that every night they had some seventy-five conversions, 
because he required those persons who were influenced to stand 
up and avow it ; that it appeared necessary for the registering of 
the conviction to do even so simple an act as standing up. 

And Mr. Aitken asserted that if Dr. Torrey took the advice 
of the newspaper and abandoned his practice of making the 
convicted openly avow it, he would in a week's time be preaching 
to hundreds instead of to thousands. 

The newspaper had stigmatized the action as emotional and 
ephemeral. Mr. Mr. Aitken said that he was frequently meet- 
ing people in the town who counted their spiritual life from a 
mission he had held in Swansea thirty-five 3^ears before. 

This is a significant experience. And we who belong to the 
dignified Anglican Church ought to take it to heart. I once 
heard a Canon of Canterbury say that he did not believe that 
anybody was ever converted to God in a Cathedral. And yet 
it looks almost incredible that the whole of a glorified Eternity 
should depend upon so apparently trivial an act as standing up. 

And if it be true that some such evidence of a determined 
will is necessary to confirm the change and give the soul a new 



Incidents Connected with People I Have Known 73 

start, the rigid conventionality of onr Anglican Clmrch has 
much to answer for. 

Of course, the theory of the Anglican Church is, that all 
the worshippers are converted people. The essentials of Con- 
version Repentance and Faith are required before the sign of 
Baptism, the entrance into the visible church, is administered. 

And this is the only theory upon which an act of public 
worship could be arranged and a Book of Common Prayer 
formulated. Still the experience of life goes to show that even 
at Confirmation, at which a definite change is supposed to be 
ratified, if not consummated, conversion does not invariably 
take place. 

Far be it from me to say that such a change as the quick- 
ening of insentient, the passing from death unto life, from 
darkness to the light, must necessarily be sudden. The passage of 
thousands of undoubted Christians may have been imperceptible 
and I have come to look upon what is known as sudden conver- 
sion as a special gift of God greatly to be prized, for it stands 
out in the life as an indubitable evidence of entrance into the 
family of God. 

St. John wrote his first Epistle, probably the closing chapter 
in the Bible, for the very purpose of enabling us to know 
positively whether we had experienced the "new creation" and 
had been "born again." In that Epistle he uses the word "know" 
twenty-eight times; he does not point us to any such experience 
as is understood by the word, "Conversion," but he refers us to 
the facts of life, whether we "love the brethren." He uses the 
word "Love" thirty-eight times. 

In the first chapter of Acts, the habit of Christians is de- 
scribed as consisting of four essentials. St. Luke says, they 
remained in the "Doctrine of the Apostles," that is, of course, 
the study of the New Testament, and in "the Fellowship," that 
is to say, they lived in a communal life, each one "minding the 
things of the others*" 



^4 Recollections and Reflections 

Thirdly, "in the Breaking of the Bread/' which was that 
mysterious act, Instituted by our Lord for confirming and 
illustrating the actual oneness of the Body of Christ, and "in 
the prayers" in public worship. The Didache, which was a 
primer of Christianity of the Apostolic age, sets forward this 
Fellowship as the prominent idea of the Eucharist. 

There is nothing here of Sacrifice which Sacerdotalism 
has read into the Institution. But "The Teaching" declares that 
as the grains of corn once scattered over the hills were brought 
together into the loaf which was again broken and consumed 
by the Communicants, becoming by eating, incorporated with 
their bodies, so were they united into the Body of Christ; and 
becoming actual members of each other were mutually careful 
of each other's wants and interdependant. It is by the exhibition 
of this practical Fellowship that St. John tells us, "we may 
know that we have Eternal life." 

It was because the Corinthian Christians ate the supper 
in cliques, the rich and the smart set at one end of the room 
and the poor and the slaves at the other, that St. Paul said, 
they ate to their own damnation for not "discerning the Body." 
In other words, they did what we are doing, emasculating that 
idea of Fellowship which is the great teaching of the Gospel 
of Christ. 



CHAPTER XI. 

On the Guidance of Life. 

It is one of the prime questions of a clergyman's teachings 
how to hear and translate the Voice which is promised to us, 
"This is the way, walk ye in it, when ye turn to the right hand 
or to the left." 

In my own personal guiding whenever I have reached a 
place which required a decision of great moment, where the 
difficulty of deciding for the best was increased by one's own 
likes and dislikes, I have followed an invariable rule which 
never failed me in practice. 

I single out a friend whom I think has good judgment in 
that particular, and I pray God to give me His answer through 
the agent I have chosen, and I make up my mind that what- 
ever his reply may be, I shall at once act on it. 

To illustrate: After the first Cathedral had been finished 
some six months, Bishop Spalding told me that I was a failure 
and a detriment to his work in the diocese, and the best thing 
I could do for the good of the Church was to go back to 
England. 

Of course, this was a desperate situation, and I was greatly 
perplexed as to what to do, but I followed my rule. I singled 
out a man of calm judgment, a lifelong churchman, and who 
was then as much a friend to Bishop Spalding as to me. And 
I prayed God to give me His answer through him, determining 
whatever his answer should be, I would abide by it. I enjoined 
him to secrecy, not permitting him even to tell his wife the 
subject of my question. 

75 



76 Recollections and Reflections 

I then told him the Bishop's conversation and asked him, 
if he considered it would be for the benefit of the Church, if I 
and my family returned to England. He was very much aston- 
ished and asked if I had forgotten the existence of the Cathedral ; 
if I noticed the large congregations; and what stimulant we 
had given to the religious interests in the town; all the other 
denominations were compelled to build great churches, as we 
had done. I replied, that I was aware of these things, but as 
nothing was so difficult for a man to know as himself, I thought 
it was possible I had overrated the evidences of advancement 
and the Bishop, who ought to know the conditions of his diocese, 
evidently thought otherwise. 

"Well," I said, "Colonel, what is your answer?" He re- 
plied : "Of course, if you insist on going back to England you'll 
have to go. But if you do we shall collapse and the Cathedral 
will become a white elephant on our hands." Then I said: 
"Without any hesitation you say I am not to obey the Bishop, 
and that I am to remain with you." He replied: "Certainly, 
without a shadow of a doubt." I remained, and it is thirty-five 
years since that day. 

On another occasion, when it had become evident that it 
would be impossible to educate my six children out here in 
the West, I considered the question of sending them all home 
to English schools, and my son to Cambridge, where his fore- 
bears had graduated. 

Again I selected a banker friend who had a fine judgment 
in all things. I laid before him the pros and cons. After due 
consideration, he replied: "I should send them all back." I 
went straight from his office and bought their passages; the 
result has shown "the thing was of God." 

Sometimes I have had an extraordinary answer from the 
Bible. When I had seen my family off on the train and returned 
to the empty Deanery, my mail was on my study table, it was 



On the Guidance of Life 77 

raining and the cat came and rubbed herself against my leg 
in sympathy. The empty house seemed desolation itself. 

I opened a letter from my sister, Mrs. Garnett, the well 
known head of the Navvy Mission, who has given her life to the 
spiritual and material interests of the seventy thousand navvies 
who as nomads move about England from one place of work 
to another. 

The letter implored me not to send my son so young to 
Cambridge. She knew the temptations of the University. 

I need hardly say that all this greatly shocked my confidence 
as to whether I had done right. A Bible was lying on the 
table before me and I said: "Lord, give me comfort out of 
Thy Word." I opened the Book at random and I only saw 
one verse, II Samuel xiv:ll : "As the Lord liveth there shall not 
one hair of thy son fall to the earth" ; which came literally true. 

One of my parishioners, Mrs. Ross-Lewin, was afflicted with 
tuberculosis of the spine. The affected part could only be 
reached by a pelvic operation, to which she had submitted twice, 
and then the mischief seemed to be recurring and, of course, it 
was a desperate question for her whether she should undergo 
the operation a third time. 

She was a godly woman and prayed for the lifting of her 
anxiety and sought, as I had done, to have an answer from the 
Bible. She put her finger in at random and the text under 
her finger was, mirabile dictu, "Do it the third time, and they 
did it the third time." I Kings xvii:34. The operation was 
successful, but eventually the white plague took her to the 
white home. 

Another remarkable instance of the same mode of knowing 
the will of God was told me by my father, of Charles Simeon. 
My father was one of "Simeon's lambs," as the adherents of that 
truly great man were called in derision at Cambridge. 

Those were dark days and Simeon, a Fellow of Kings, was 
the solitary light-bearer. It scarcely seems credible that when 



78 Recollections and Reflections 

a few men met for the study of the Greek Testament, they were 
mobbed and stoned. 

Simeon was Vicar of one of the churches in the town. 
So antagonistic were the parishioners to the vigorous preaching 
of the Gospel that they locked the doors of the pews, which were 
private property, and "went with the house." So Mr. Simeon 
built galleries round the church, and there was the singular 
sight of a church with the galleries crowded and the pews in the 
body of the church empty. 

Coming to his rooms one Sunday night after an unusually 
stormy day, a mob had jeered and pelted him as he left. He 
wondered if it were God's will that he should persist amid 
such violent opposition. He sought for an answer from the 
Word. His Greek Testament was on the table and he, too, put 
his finger towards the end of the book as he supposed, that 
he might possibly get advice from some practical verse in the 
Epistles. 

But the Testament was upside down, his finger was in 
the Gospel of St. Matthew and covered the verse, "Him they 
compelled to bear his cross" (St. Matthew xxvii:32). And right 
manfully did he bear it. Before he died he was the revered man 
in the university; and at the end they bore his coffin, shoulder 
high, four times round King's College Square, followed by all 
the dignitaries of the university, who rendered well deserved 
homage to a faithful and unselfish life well and honorably lived. 

The indisposition to believe that such incidents as these 
are any other than accidental coincidences, and not caused by 
the direction of a Spiritual Intelligence as well as significant 
answers to definite prayer, arises from the fact, that they may 
be classed as miraculous ; and the atmosphere of the scientific age 
through which we have just passed is adverse to believing that 
there ever can be interference with the workings of nature. 

All definitions of miracles, simple or elaborate, contain 
for their essence, that a miracle is an inroad into the ordinary 



On the Guidance of Life 79 

working of the course of nature: it is an interference with a 
natural sequence. 

One day I was in the train with a Jewish Rabbi, who be- 
longs to the Reformed Jews, who are practically Unitarians and 
Materialists. Our conversation turned on the miracles of the 
New Testament, for which he proffered all kinds of explanations, 
remarking : "You know, Dean, there can be no such thing as a 
miracle, that is, an interference with the well defined law of 
nature." 

I asked him if he had ever considered the remarkable fact, 
that the point of the maximum density of water was seven 
degrees above its freezing point? He said he had not. I then 
reminded him that it was a universal law of nature that all 
things contract as their temperature falls; that there was only 
one exception to this general law, which water obeyed until it 
reached a temperature of thirty-nine and a half degrees Fah- 
renheit and then although there is no alteration in any of its 
qualities, it disobeys the law and begins to expand until it 
becomes ice at thirty-two degrees. 

The consequence of this extraordinary fact is, that the 
heaviest water, that of a temperature of thirty-nine and a half 
degrees, sinks to the bottom of lakes and rivers and is warmer 
than the water which turns into ice at the surface. Of course, 
if this were not so, if freezing were to begin at the bottom, in 
a single winter all fresh water would become solid ice, to the 
extinction of all fresh water fish in temperate zones. 

There can be only one explanation of this phenomenon 
which is a palpable interference with a law of nature, that is a 
miracle, which is, that a Being who has the capability, interfered 
with the operation of the law at that point because if He had 
not done so, huge detriment must have ensued to a large area 
of his Creation. 

The Rabbi had nothing to say. It is a very curious thing 
that this fact in nature had not been made more of in the con- 



80 Recollections and Reflections 

troversy which raged fifty years ago between some scientific men 
and the leaders of religious thought. 

Since those days, however, the prominence into which 
psychic considerations have forced themselves have largely modi- 
fied scientific views of matter. And the antagonistic position 
of science against religion has almost disappeared. 

On of the most indisputable answers to prayer which ever 
came within the range of my experience occurred in the family 
of my wife. The youngest sister of the eminent Bishop of Cal- 
cutta, Daniel Wilson, was a Mrs. Piper. They were people of 
substance living at Sydenham, near London. They had several 
children, and then, after a hiatus of six years, a little boy 
appeared. They called him Benjamin, the youngest. 

It is hardly necessary to say that the house turned about 
Benny. When he was two years old he was stricken with that 
unmanageable disease, spinal meningitis. Their wealth brought 
down from London the leading doctors, who soon pronounced 
his case hopeless. 

When Mrs. Piper, who was an eminently religious woman, 
opened the Bible to Mark xi :21 : "What things soever ye desire, 
when ye pray, believe that ye receive them, and ye shall have 
them," kneeling down she put her finger on the text and Canon 
Bateman, who was present, told me that the room shook with 
the agony of her petition, that God would ratify His promise 
and give her the life of her child. 

Contrary to all medical experience and in a manner that 
could only indicate the interference of the Most High, Benny 
lived, but remained an infant for fourteen years. The intimates 
of the house would go to the nursery to see him where he lay 
in his cradle attended by a special nurse. 

It was thought he knew his mother, but otherwise he 
showed no signs of intelligence, and when, at the end of fourteen 
years of chastisement, Benny died there was no one in the house- 
hold more ready than his mother to say, "Thy will be done." 




THE FIRST CATHEDRAL. 1881-1903. 



CHAPTER XII. 
First Visit to Denver. 

In 1871 I was working unreasonably hard; School, honestly 
teaching all day till five o'clock; Church, two sermons every 
Sunday to a congregation largely composed of successful Lon- 
don merchants and professional men; public meetings almost 
every night to direct committees to organize their charities; 
writing considerably for Messrs. Cassell, Petter and Galpin. 

I wrote, all too hurriedly, the Geological, Mineralogical and 
Chemical Articles for their "Popular Educator," a sort of Edu- 
cational Encyclopedia which had an enormous sale. My articles 
were about as valuable as the little money I received for them. 

All this work was far too much for any man. I lost in 
weight and sleep, and finally nature called a halt in the Fall by 
a hemorrhage. But God provided a way of escape, as usual. 

One of my congregation called upon me to ask me if I 
could recommend any friend of mine who would take a long- 
tour with the son of one of his Directors. I recommended him 
to a barrister whom I knew needed just such a rest. But after 
an interview with him, he returned again saying that he was 
hardly the kind of man they were seeking. 

I had a little scientific and public reputation and this 
brought me into contact with several of the London physicians. 
And here let me record my gratitude to the profession, I have 
never paid a doctor's bill in my life. It is true I have buried 
their dead for nothing and freely baptised the children they 
brought into the world. Still the kindness of many of my 
medical friends has been unspeakable. 

81 



82 Recollections and Reflections 

I consulted eight, and I am bound to say they all differed. 
The last one on the list was Dr. Kidd, Disraeli's physician, and 
whose waiting rooms were always crowded with patients. One 
day I went to his office in Finsbury Square. The waiting room 
as usual was full of a melancholy crowd. I went down the 
passage to the little room where I knew the great man sat, and 
when I heard him dismiss his consultee I walked in. 

"Hello, Hart, what are you doing here?" "Listen to my 
lungs, Kidd/' I replied, throwing back the lapels of my coat. 
The great man's stethoscope moved cautiously over my chest 
and stopped still over the top of my left lung. And then he 
said, "My dear fellow, I am sorry to tell you that there is half 
a square inch diseased on the top of the left lung;" and I said 
to myself, "Thank you for nothing I know there isn't," and I 
said aloud, "A West Indian merchant has just asked me to take 
a travel with his son." 

The doctor, who was a Plymouth Brother and therefore a 
man of God, said: "God put it into your way, for you must 
certainly leave England this winter." "And where shall I go ?" 
I asked. He thought for a moment, and then said, "To San 
Francisco." And I am afraid I must say if he had chosen any 
other spot on the face of the globe it would have been 
preferable; for in that city, owing to the configuration of the 
coast line, there are four climates a day, one of the changes 
being a sea-fog. Such a variety of atmospheric conditions can- 
not be conducive to the relief of any pulmonary trouble. 

A complete change being evidently inevitable, I accepted 
the offer to become a compagnon de voyage to a young gentleman 
of some twenty-five summers, who had never known anything 
but prosperity, which had been his evil genius and had led 
him into a wide excursion into the shady side of life. 

He had, however, a charming nature, and we never had a 
ruffle. And although our views as to the value of money were 
as wide apart as the poles, he bore what he considered my 



First Visit to Denver 83 

absurd economy cum aequo animo and for six months we got on 
capitally. 

We left Liverpool in the Calabria. It being the end of 
October the sea was not as calm as in July. I happened to be 
a good sailor, so had leisure to study Dr. Pole's book on Whist, 
for I had early discovered that White was, of course, an adept 
at cards, and I knew if I did not take a hand we should often 
be separated for hours. I was interested in Dr. Pole, he was an 
eminent engineer. I think he was responsible for the first rail- 
way in Japan. He also was a Mus. Doc. and frequently helped 
me with organ and musical societies. 

By the time we neared America and White had got his sea- 
legs, I was a first rate Whist-player, and I found this accom- 
plishment gave me not a little influence over my companion. 

We landed in New York on the ninth of November and 
found that Mr. Greeley had just been defeated for the Presi- 
dency. The banners and election paraphernalia were all novel 
and greatly amused us. 

Besides Mr. White's agent, we only had one introduction, to 
Mr. Royal Phelps, who very kindly interested himself in us. 
Of course, clergymen are a brotherhood, and I soon became 
acquainted with some of my New York brethren, especially with 
the Rev. Frederick Courtney, at that time the assistant at St. 
Thomas', who afterwards became Bishop of Nova Scotia and 
after resigning his diocese was the Rector of St. James', New 
York, and is still my valued friend. 

On the Sunday I went to hear Mr. Beecher, of world 
renown. I was hardly prepared for the plain and entirely un- 
adorned place of worship ; very different from what I had been 
led to expect of the luxury of a congregation which gave their 
pastor what sounded to an English ear an enormous income. 

I was not at all struck with his address. Clever and 
theatrical, but it contained no spiritual uplift. After the ser- 
mon a number of babies were baptised. It was far from an 



84 Recollections and Reflections 

impressive service, the congregation making audible comments 
on the appearance and behavior of the babies. 

Mr. Beecher passed round the half circle of parents, fol- 
lowed by, I suppose, a deacon holding a silver bowl of water into 
which the Pastor dipped his fingers and sprinkled each baby as 
he came to it, pronouncing with its name the baptismal formula. 
I think Mr. Beecher was purposely conserving his strength for 
his evening sermon, which he announced would be "The Fire 
of Boston," which beloved city was then in conflagration. 

Nothing of clerical interest happened to us until we arrived 
at Niagara. The mighty falls were in the icy fingers of King 
Winter. The ever rising spray had festooned all the branches 
of the trees of the neighborhood with clear ice and tons of 
crystal pillars mounted on either side of the tumbling water. 

Of course, all the great holiday hotels were closed, and we 
found refuge in a Swiss hotel a few yards from the end of the 
bridge. Mine host was from Berne, he had persistently retained 
his small Swiss features while everything else prosperity had 
enlarged so that his tiny eyes, nose and mouth were surrounded 
by a large frame of red fat flesh. 

A small mustache did its best to hide the fact that he was 
toothless, a sore subject; for one day a Yankee called at the bar 
and produced some boxes of powder which, according to the 
vendor's story, could replace decayed enamel and in trice impart 
a pearly lustre to the dingiest of teeth. 

Eosli's teeth even beggared that description, but being still 
careful of his appearance, he invested in the powder. The 
Yankee, so good natured was he, applied it with his own finger, 
and having received our host's money and thanks, recrossed 
the bridge and was absorbed in his native continent. But alas ! 
in three months the teeth of the confiding Rosli dropped out. 

There was only one guest in the inn. Curiously enough 
he was a Canadian engineer who, when staying with a cousin 
at Blackheath, had gone with me in the carriage to Greenwich 



First Visit to Denver 85 

when I spoke at the Town Hall on behalf of the canvass of Miss 
Emily Davies for a place on the School Board. This was forty 
years ago, and I was then anxious that the girls in the Board 
Schools should be taught sewing and dressmaking. It is prov- 
erbial how the women of the working classes are helpless in 
clothing their children. 

We succeeded in electing Miss Davies by a large majority, 
and as far as I know she was the first woman to occupy a public 
position. 

The law required that the member of the Board who had 
been elected by the highest number of votes should occupy the 
chair. It was with no submissive spirit that Canon Miller, 
"the Lion of Greenwich/' had to take the second place* 

But to return to our fellow guest, for this is the reason of 
my mention of him. He was a religious man, and finding 
himself unable to induce his wife and daughter to live a less 
worldly life he had ignominiously turned his back upon the 
contest and run away from his home. 

I dare say he reckoned it to be God's providence that he had 
fallen upon our company. For it is needless to say we argued 
the whole matter and supplied him with many suggestions which 
he returned to Toronto to put into practice. Let us hope that 
God made the members of that family to be of one mind in the 
house. 

I met lately an Archdeacon of Nevada who lived at Reno, 
a town of evil repute for the laxity of its divorce court. A lady 
of some wealth sought a divorce from her husband on the 
ground of cruelty. It was disclosed in court that the cruelty 
consisted in her husband's continued opposition to her worldly 
life; that he would, upon her return from some frivolity, read 
her extracts from the Bible. 

The judge ruled that this was cruelty and granted the 
divorce. The Archdeacon declared that the judgment of God 
followed them both. Within three months the judge was found 



86 Recollections and Reflections 

dead in his room, and one evening the woman was sitting in 
her room in a hotel in Chicago when a man on the opposite side 
of the court was cleaning his pistol. It accidentally went off, 
the bullet flew across the court, through the window in her 
room, struck her in the back and she fell dead. 

The Gorge of Niagara is always of great interest to geol- 
ogists, for it is really one of the very few time measures we 
have of geological changes. 

In the glacial period, when one-fifth of the water in the 
sea covered the earth with a cap of ice as far south as a line 
roughly joining New York and San Francisco, the drainage of 
the great depression filled by the Great Lakes could not go west 
in its present channels but followed the Wabash into the Mis- 
sissippi and so into the Gulf of Mexico. 

When, however, the ice began to retreat and the Mohawk 
Valley was cleared, the outlet of the Lakes followed its present 
channel. As the water came to the edge of the escarpment it 
formed the Falls of Niagara at a point seven miles west of their 
present situation. 

It so happens that this escarpment is made by a fault in 
the horizontal sedimentary rocks, the uppermost layer of which 
is harder than the ones below it, so that the water and the 
weathering processes eating away the softer rock, slabs of the 
upper layer fall into the bed below. By this process the Falls 
have eaten back a gorge seven miles long. 

Now, it is possible, from the observation of the settlers in 
the neighborhood, to make a calculation as to the rate of the 
erosion. Sir Charles Lyell in 1844 paid a visit to the Falls and 
he came to the conclusion that they were receding at the rate 
of a foot a year, so that it had taken 34,000 years to form the 
gorge. A few years later Mr. Bakewell, another of the fathers 
of English geology, reviewed Sir Charles' estimate, and upon 
further investigation concluded that the Falls were retreating 
at the rate of a yard a year, so that 10,000 years would account 



First Visit to Denver 87 

for the making of the gorge. Ten years later Mr. Bakewell's son 
reviewed his father's conclusions and corroborated them. 

In 1889 the American Association for the Advancement of 
Science held its session at Bnifalo and this question was the 
chief interest in its discussions. 

Professor Gilbert, a noted glacialist, was President, and they 
finally concluded that 7,500 years would be a sufficient time for 
the erosion; and the President said that "no doubt this period 
would allow of some reduction." This reduction was subse- 
quently made by Dr. Julius Pohlman, a resident of Buffalo, 
who pointed out the fact that the Chippewa and the Warotonga, 
affluents of the Xiagara Kiver, were pre-glacial and therefore a 
considerable portion of the gorge must have been already eroded 
before the glaciers arrested the process; and he concluded that 
3,500 years would be a sufficient time to account for the present 
condition of the gorge. The question however may still be re- 
garded as unsettled. 

Now all this is a prime element in estimating the Antiquity 
of Man, for there are no indications of the presence of man 
prior to the glacial period. All stone arrow-heads and imple- 
ments occur mainly in post-glacial drift; that is, on the banks 
of the rivers made by the sudden melting of the ice. 

Periods of time ascribed by Egyptologists and other 
antiquaries to their findings are matters of supposition, but the 
lapse of time indicated by the Gorge of Niagara is a matter 
of calculation. 

The supreme interest attached to this question is the 
corroboration of the Biblical account of the appearance of Man 
on the earth. Archbishop Usher's dates in the Bible cannot be 
far wrong, that is, that the creation of Adam was not quite 
six thousand years ago. 

The cradle of the race was Mesopotamia, and here again 
the survivors of the Flood established themselves. It must 
have been in their time that the heat of the sun so increased 



88 Recollections and Reflections 

as to melt the glaciers suddenly, if the foregoing estimates are 
correct. We have had since 1855 eight instances of stars, that 
is, Suns, in our neighborhood suddenly increasing their brilli- 
ance and in some cases stars of the thirteenth magnitude have 
within a few months blazed out to the second magnitude. 

If in our sun a similar conflagration had occurred a suffi- 
cient heat would have been produced to account for the sudden 
melting of the ice; but this rise in temperature would greatly 
affect the pasturage of the flocks and herds of the inhabitants 
of the plain of Shinar. 

They did what we do in hot weather; they moved north- 
wards until they arrived at the very confines of the melting ice. 
Their metal instruments with years of use must have disap- 
peared and they were compelled by necessity to make weapons 
out of flints. 

We must remember that this art was well known to the 
primitive peoples. In the laws of Hammurabi there is a regula- 
tion as to the fee the surgeon shall charge whether he uses a 
bronze or a stone knife. They must have brought the art of 
sharpening stone to a great perfection. 

It has been usual to suppose that stone implements were 
the work of primitive men struggling upwards to a civilization, 
but it is quite possible that they may have been the work of 
men who had no metallurgic conveniences and had been reduced 
by necessity to use stone; men losing rather than gaining a 
civilization. 

It is not a little remarkable that the meanings of the 
names of the leaders of men preserved for us in the eleventh 
chapter of Genesis should lend themselves to this supposition. 

Of course, the inhabitants of Mesopotamia would try every 
possible device to preserve pasturage for their cattle before they 
were compelled to take the violent course of emigrating north. 
If the meanings of the names were better understood I have no 
doubt that we would have more insight into the history of the 



First Visit to Denver 89 

time than the meagre hints our insufficient knowledge grants us ; 
but Terah the father of Abraham means "cooling/* which seems 
to indicate that the conflagration in the sun was dying down 
and the next generation resumed its normal habit and picked 
up not a little of the civilization which the Deluge had destroyed. 

Leaving Niagara, in a day or two we found ourselves in 
Jhicago, a city of ruins, for it was the year after the fire. 

Dr. Sullivan, the Eector of Trinity, afterwards Bishop of 
Algoma — where rough life and rough food soon shattered his 
constitution and he went to the "better land" — was most kind 
and hospitable. He drove us about the city and took us to the 
celebrated Stock Yards where we saw that pathetic procession of 
pigs slowly but inevitably ascending an inclined plane to the top 
of a four-story building, where they passed into an open door, 
and before the echo of their final squeal had well-nigh died 
away, their hams were salted and ready for packing on the 
ground floor ! 

One evening Dr. Sullivan took us to a church social where 
some forty or fifty of his parishioners made "an evening of it." 
Dr. Sullivan questioned the value of such socials, as I have fre- 
quently done since. 

When we had seen all we wanted to see of the great Metrop- 
olis of the West, White expressed a wish to shoot a buffalo, so 
we turned into a Western Union Telegraph office and asked an 
operator if there were any buffalo in the country? at which he 
smiled and said, "Plenty." "Can you find out for us where 
there is a herd?" "Yes, if you will pay," was his business-like 
reply, "come this afternoon." In the afternoon we returned 
and he said, "There is a herd of buffalo grazing at Wallace, on 
the K. P." "What might the K. P. be T' I asked, and on being 
informed that it was the Kansas Pacific Eailway, we thanked 
him and purchased our tickets to Wallace. 

We arrived at Kansas City on Sunday. I there found a 
Fr. Betts, who I afterwards learned had been a Methodist min- 



90 Recollections and Reflections 

ister in Denver and who had "joined the Church." As usual 
the pendulum had swung to the other extreme, and I found him 
a "highfalutin' " Ritualist. He was then operating in a tin 
tabernacle, with the "six points." He had once been a mis- 
sionary to the Indians. One day a chief came to him and said, 
"I am told that the Great Spirit of the White Blankets can cure 
darkness ; I have a dark heart, I want to be cured." Mr. Betts 
invited him to come to the Service. He came; a prayer was 
offered up for him and tears ran down his face. Shortly after- 
wards he stood up and waved his hand — the signal that he was 
going to speak. It was no use attempting to stop him for when 
a chief wants to speak, he speaks: "My son went on the war- 
path ; his scalp hangs in the wigwam of a Sioux ; my heart grew 
dark. When the clouds cover the sky it is dark ; then the Great 
Spirit speaks, the rain falls, the clouds go, the sun shines, the 
birds sing, and all is bright and happy. My heart was dark; 
the Great Spirit spoke to me, the rain fell, and now my heart is 
light. I have done." 

Fr. Betts gave me my first introduction to an American 
Bishop, Bishop Lee, the first Bishop of Iowa, with whom I had 
tea. He was a comely old gentleman, quite in keeping with the 
democratic sentiments of the country. 

In due time we arrived at Wallace, a city of half a dozen 
wooden houses dabbed down on the interminable prairie, a be- 
calmed ocean of brownish colored land. We were fortunate in 
finding a hunter, Jerry Gardiner, who had come into the depot 
with his "meat," the hams of the buffalo wrapped in their skins, 
which he freighted to Chicago and received four dollars for each 
"bundle." 

Jerry very willingly, for a due exchange of dollars, offered 
to take us to his camp, some fifteen or twenty miles out on the 
prairie. The exhilaration, and sense of freedom that ride con- 
veyed, I shall never forget. We found he had a tent and the 
paraphernalia of a hunter's camp scattered about at the bottom 



First Visit to Denver 91 

of an arroya. He was kind enough to allow his guests to sleep 
in the tent, while he and his cook, and the "skinner," slept 
under a tarpaulin outside. 

The boundless prairie, stretching on every side to the hori- 
zon, was dotted here and there with black spots, which were the 
buffalo peacefully grazing. The moment the sun went down 
the thermometer fell in sympathy, and how far that useful in- 
strument grovelled in abasement will be best understood by the 
almost incredible fact, that as we were breakfasting, just as the 
sun looked above the horizon, as I was eating a piece of buffalo 
steak, and turned round to sip my coffee which was on the grass 
beside me, the spoon was frozen in the cup ! 

I regret to say that I did shoot a buffalo, but there is no 
more what is understood by sport in that feat than in shooting 
a cow in a farm-yard. I therefore enjoyed myself in attempting 
to catch a buffalo calf. In some way it had become lamed and 
so afforded a fair chance of capture, but just as I was about to 
grab its tail it spurted forward and pursued that plan of cam- 
paign for an hour or so, when I was obliged to confess myself 
beaten and began to wonder where I was and how I should find 
my way back to camp. I had heard of men being "plained" and 
becoming first dazed and then insane, so I determined to fix on 
a route at a certain angle to my shadow, for I remembered the 
camp was on a creek which ran at a right angle to the path I 
had resolved to take. I did not then know how to find the 
points of the compass by the hands of a watch, which is simply 
done by turning the hour hand towards the sun, and half way 
between its position and 12 o'clock is due south. I once was 
told that Stanley, the African traveller, learned it from a friend 
he was talking to in Eegent Street, and it was news to him. So 
I set off in my predetermined direction to "strike" the creek. 
After going for two or three hours I began to doubt; then that 
assertion came to my rescue — "he that doubteth is damned by 
his doubt" — and I still remember my relief, as the sun was 



92 Recollections and Reflections 

beginning to sink I saw the creek. Following its course for 
three or four miles I arrived at the camp just as the whole party 
was setting out to find me. The) 7 had discharged an arsenal 
of ammunition, but as far as sound was concerned I might 
have been all day in the City of the Dead. 

In three days we had had enough of buffalo hunting, and 
Jerry drove us, with another load of "meat/' back to the depot. 
We asked where the train went to and they told us a town 
called Denver, so we purchased our tickets to Denver. Little 
did I then think that it would be my home for all these long 
years. 

The Pullman car conductor made a little "on the side" by 
reporting for the Rocky Mountain News'. We put up at the 
Delmonico of the West, the only hostel in Denver which was fit, 
so the conductor told us, for two such eminent people as we 
were. How eminent, he let us know next morning in The 
News. He couldn't have said more about the Archbishop of 
Canterbury than he did about me, and as for White — who had 
tipped with his usual disregard for money — he was evidently a 
prince travelling incog. So Denver was made aware that it 
had two distinguished visitors. 

Singularly enough, the clergyman in charge of the little 
wooden church was a brother of Mrs. Weitbrecht, the noted 
Indian missionary, whom I happened to know. He called upon 
us, and of course I must preach on Sunday. Bishop Randall 
was in the East raising money, which is an annual custom of 
missionary bishops. Of course to hear so distinguished a 
clergyman, the little church was full ! I prayed that the seed 
sown might not be in vain, and my prayer was answered in a 
very different manner from what I hoped. 

During the week we went up to Central City, for as I had 
written the geological articles for Cassell's Popular Educator, 
I was greatly interested in mines. I there saw some of the 
mines, and Hill's smelter, and on being told that the "matte" 






First Visit to Denver 93 

was sent to Swansea, in Wales, to extract the bullion, I remem- 
ber remarking, "Why in the world don't you get someone out 
from Swansea to do it here?" This eventually they did, and 
Mr. Richard Pearce, the eminent metallurgist upon whom Co- 
lumbia College conferred its Doctor's degree, became the metal- 
lurgical authority of the West and directed the processes at 
Argo, the smelter Senator Hill built for the treatment of the 
Colorado ores. 

Dr. Pearce was one of our distinguished citizens for many 
years. He was an earnest and liberal supporter of our Cathe- 
dral, and his boys sang in the choir. It was a universal regret 
when he returned to England, where he still survives his long- 
time partner, Senator Hill, and the generation his genius served 
so well. 

I had translated for CasselVs & pretentious French work, 
Monquin Tandon's "Monde de la Mere." One of the copies 
happened to be at the booksellers, Chain and Hardy's, on Lari- 
mer Street. Somebody discovered it, and I was requested to 
give a lecture on the zoology of the sea, which I did at For- 
rester's Opera House, which then occupied the site of the pres- 
ent Daniels and Fisher store. 

I preached again on the following Sunday, and left Denver 
for Salt Lake City, where we spent Christmas. 

Salt Lake City was far more Mormon in those days than it 
is now. I made an attempt to see Brigham Young and I am 
sorry to say I did not succeed. We attended service on Christ- 
mas Day in the red stone edifice which is still there ; and Bishop 
Turtle preached, arguing for the plurality of the Deity from the 
fact that love is a relative quality and must have some object 
on which to expend itself — which the love of the Father found 
in his Son. 

The Bishop was kind enough to give me a hymn book 
which contained that chant-form for the Gloria in Excelsis so 



94 Recollections and Reflections 

common in this country, and which I introduced into England. 
We were in San Francisco the last Sunday in the year. 

I had brought a few sermons with me for special occasions, 
amongst them one for the last Sunday in the year. It was on 
the text, "God requireth that which is past," but as Dr. La- 
throp, the rector, preached on that very text, I declined to 
occupy his pulpit in the evening. Instead, I went to the Pres- 
byterian church, where I heard a young gentleman in a black 
tie describe Dr. Chalmers walking out of the Assembly the day 
of the great Secession. There was a quartet choir which sang 
offensively with a non-religious insouciance, and this was the 
last Sabbath evening of the year ! I went away heart-sick at 
an opportunity so lost. 

The atmosphere of the city didn't seem to have changed 
much in a whole generation, for when I was at the General 
Convention in 1901, they had a male choir, much belauded, in 
the chief church, which sang with a similar lack of religious 
feeling; the way they rendered the General Confession sounded 
almost blasphemy. Bishop Dudley preached on that occasion a 
sermon which did much to rescue the service from being an 
offense. 

We crossed the Pacific to Japan, en route to China, in a 
paddle steamer with a walking beam. It took us thirty-one 
days; sometimes we only made sixty miles a day. It was an 
anxious question for the officers whether our coal would last. We 
never saw another vessel except a sister ship, the New York going 
West, with whom we exchanged papers. Of course we had the 
usual assortment of missionaries, merchants, and young men go- 
ing to seek their fortune. The gamblers gambled and the know- 
ing ones fleeced the lambs, and one or two young fellows lost all 
their capital. The captain and myself had become good friends. 
He sometimes would consult me in the emergencies which met 
us. When we neared Japan I said to him, "You are the master 
of this ship, Captain, the whole and sole authority; these young 



First Visit to Denver 95 

fellows have had their fun; isn't it a pity to let them land 
broken in fortune and without any means of making a start? 
They will forever after curse the good ship China. Why not 
come into the smoking room and require the winners to give 
back their gains so that they may all land with about the same 
money they had in their pockets when they left?" And that is 
what the captain did, to the ease and contentment of such of his 
passengers who played cards, except of course some of the win- 
ners who would, if they could, have resisted his authority. 

Fortunately for me one of my Blackheath congregation 
was the financial adviser for the Japanese Government, and this 
made our stay in Yeddo, as the capital was then called, pleasant 
and profitable, for Japan was just then emerging from the 
medieval state and the transition in many particulars was not 
a little curious. Western manners and customs were the vogue, 
and the inhabitants were easily induced to buy heterogeneous 
articles of apparel. I saw one dandy with a considerably worn 
silk hat, boots with elastic sides, a cutaway coat, a bath towel 
tied in a bow round his neck, black cotton gloves and a black 
cotton umbrella under his arm, the rest of his attire being 
Japanese ! 

At Yokohama I visited a school kept by two American la- 
dies. There were thirty or forty Japanese women and girls. 
The wife of the Governor of Yokohama was one of the pupils ; 
her jinrikisha was waiting for her outside the school. They 
sang for me some hymns in Japanese. That evening I had the 
honor of dining with sixteen Yokohama merchants. I spoke of 
my morning's experience in the school. Fifteen of the gentle- 
men had never heard of it, and the sixteenth said, "And a pretty 
penny those American women are making out of it"; whereas 
the missionaries were working for the love of Christ and freely 
gave what they had freely received. How little we any of us 
know what is going on in our neighborhood unless we look for it. 

I once heard Lord Northbrook, who had been Governor 



96 Recollections and Reflections 

General of India, say that Christianity had honeycombed the 
idolatrous beliefs and some day the ancient fabric would fall 
into ruins, and yet he admitted he had never once been in a 
Mission Station to examine for himself the source of this great 
undermining force. 

At Shanghai I was fortunate in finding another friend, 
Mr. Barnes, the agent of the P. & 0. Co., who took us every- 
where in the neighborhood. We visited a Chinese arsenal some 
miles up the river. A blue-button mandarin had charge of the 
works. A week or two before, three Scotchmen who made his 
gunpowder, in celebrating S'. Andrew's Day, had got drunk, set 
the house on fire and perished in the conflagration. We were 
ushered into an ante-room; two soldiers mounted guard at its 
further end, which was hung with curtains — evidently a festive 
banquet was in progress in the room beyond. In a little time 
the curtains were drawn and the Prince entered swinging his 
arms. We were all seated in high chairs against the wall with 
a little square table between each. Three coolies entered; the 
first put down a heavy brass saucer holding a white porcelain 
cup as thin as an eggshell, the next man had a silver tea caddy, 
out of which he put into the cup three grains of tea with a long 
silver cayenne spoon, the third man filled the cup with boiling 
water. The three grains of tea unfurled themselves into three 
perfect leaves and the water became a light yellow. It had a 
smooth taste to the palate and emitted a fragrance which passed 
like incense through the head. I afterwards learnt this was 
the Mandarin tea at $34 a pound. 

During all this we carried on a conversation through an 
interpreter. Mr. Barnes introduced me as "a Joss-pidgin man 
who could make gunpowder" — Joss-pidgin being "pidgin" Chi- 
nese for a priest; Joss is a god, and "pidgin," business. This 
idea was so entirely foreign to the Chinaman's mind that he 
said three times over, looking at me, "Joss-pidgin man make 
gunpowder ?" When he had grasped the idea he pointed at me 




THE RUINS OF THE OLD CATHEDRAL. 



First Visit to Denver 97 

with his long nails, and said, "You stay here with me." Mr. 
Barnes profusely apologised and said my presence was required 
in London. 

We went two hundred miles up the Yang-tsze-kiang, in an 
American river-boat, as far as Chingkiang. Here the vessel 
had to remain a day or two. I went on shore and ascended a 
hill which was crowned by a very extensive Joss-house. Ves- 
pers were going on. Forty-five Buddhist priests followed their 
abbot in single file with a measured tread. The abbot, an old 
shaky-looking man, was dressed in a gaudy red velvet shabby 
skirt and a sombre colored toga. His monks wore gray robes, 
and over the shoulder a dirty yellow mantle, white stockings 
and shoes, and black mitres on their heads. They walked be- 
fore the idol in the figure eight, chanting the name of Buddha. 
Their Liturgy, which is in Sanskrit, was brought over from 
India by word of mouth ; they have no notion of what the sounds 
mean. A bell with a wooden clapper sounded and at certain 
parts a large drum was struck, and then they all prostrated 
themselves together. It was a solemn, sad sight. The setting 
sun calmly falling on the great gilded idols, the censer faintly 
smoking, the priests slowly moving, the curious, weird chant, 
and all for what ? or to what ? 

The City of Yang Chow was in the distance and although 
it was well in sight I had the greatest difficulty in finding a 
path — and there were many — that led to the bridge across the 
canal. It is almost impossible to go from one Chinese city to 
another without a guide, for the Chinese have an extraordinary 
notion that Evil Spirits, which are the bane of a Chinaman's 
life, will only go on straight lines, and therefore all streets and 
paths turn and twist in an unconscionable manner. And be- 
sides, the Chinese are a stay-at-home people. Archdeacon 
Moule when travelling in North China, neared a city of some 
100,000 inhabitants. Not being sure of his way, he aske.d ft 
Chinese gentleman who was leaning against the wall of his gar- 



98 Recollections and Reflections 

den, in the outskirts of a village through which he passed, to be 
good enough to direct him. The Chinaman replied that he 
didn't know. The Archdeacon asked him if he had never beep 
to the city, and with an air of astonishment the Chinaman 
replied, "No, why should I? I live here." — An apt illustration 
of that sentiment which has kept that vast population in statu 
quo all these centuries. 

When I did reach the city I was all but hooted by a curious 
mob. No doubt I was called a Foreign devil — if I had known 
the language. Coming to an open space in which the streets 
seemed to converge, there was an appalling stench which over- 
topped the multifarious smells which permeate any Chinese 
town, and looking about me I saw a coffin with the end knocked 
in, right in the middle of the traffic. I afterwards learned 
that a Chinaman invariably consults a soothsayer as to the lucky 
place where a coffin should be deposited. If for any reason the 
mystery-man bears a grudge, he will indicate an inconvenient 
spot — as he had done in this instance. A human being is sup- 
posed to have three souls. At death one joins his ancestors and 
receives worship in the ancestral tablet; another remains in the 
ambient of his house ; and the third lives in the coffin in whose 
lid there is a small round hole by which it can go in and out, 
and if the coffin is placed not according to its liking, it will 
bring trouble upon the family — hence the consultation with the 
soothsayer. 

I saw two or three young people with the small-pox erup- 
tions still out upon them and I quickly got me from that 
Chinese town. I suppose that long familiarity with unsanitary 
conditions had rendered them more immune than a delicate 
Westerner was likely to be. 

One day on the steam launch, Mr. Barnes said that his 
interpreter, Yen, was a Christian, and his father also. My con- 
versation with Yen is a sample of pidgin-English. 

"Yen, are you not a Christian?" "Me? No." "Is not 



First Visit to Denver 99 

your father a Christian?" "No." "What are you then, a 
Buddhist?" "No." "A Tauist?" "No, me no religion, going 
to take one soon, perhaps this year." Next day Mr. Barnes 
came across Yen's father ; he asked him, "What Joss-pidgin you 
b'long?" "Me b'long one piecee-Joss." "How fashion one 
piecee, you no b'long all samee 'nother Chinaman?" "No, my 
no too muchee likee Chin-Chin plenty Joss. My got one piecee 
top-side; he can sabee anything my do; s'pose my do bad pid- 
gin, he bobbery my by-and-by; s'pose my do good all proper, 
truly my no can cheatee you; s'pose I cheatee you, he sabee." 

The Chinaman's sobriquet for a Bishop is Number one 
Joss-Pidgin Man. 

All the Chinese boats have two eyes painted on the bow, and 
a Chinaman says syllogistically : 

"No got eye, how can see? 

No can see, how can sabee? 

No can sabee, how can catchee dollar?" 



CHAPTER XIII. 

Hindu Peculiarities 

The P. and 0. steamer which took us from Bombay to Suez 
was freighted with the usual cargo of Indians returning home. 
Judge Turner, an Appeal Judge, told me one or two interesting 
traits of the Indian character. 

When on the North Circuit, he inspected the prison at 
Allahabad. He found sixty boy murderers who had been taught 
English by a soldier who was serving a term of four years. He 
asked one of the most proficient what he was there for? The 
boy, with a subtle Indian reply, said, "A suit." "Criminal or 
Civil?" asked the Judge. "Criminal/' the boy replied. 
"What was the cause of the suit?" pursued the Judge. "Jew- 
els," the boy answered. "So you killed your playmate for his 
jewels, did you?" 

Then Judge Turner asked him, "Are you sorry for what 
you have done?" And the boy looked at him with a blank 
expression. Then he asked in his native language, "Have you 
any sorrow in your heart for killing him?" Again the boy 
seemed at a loss to reply and finally the Judge said, "Do you 
know you have done wrong?" And the lad replied, "I suppose 
so or I shouldn't be here." A curious psychic study that a boy 
who had committed murder was hardly conscious of his tre- 
mendous sin. 

He gave me an illustration of the singular subtlety of the 
Indian mind. A man conceived the idea of ousting the owner 
of a large estate. With this object in view he commenced ficti- 



100 



Hindu Peculiarities 101 

tious proceedings against suppositious farmers on the estate, 
having them carefully registered in the records of the court. 

Of course, every case was undefended and judgment given 
for the plaintiff. He pursued the deceptive course for sixteen 
years and then brought a suit of ejectment. The action was 
tried in a local court and the magistrate gave judgment for the 
plaintiff which would have deprived the legal owner of his 
estate. Of course, he appealed. The case was retried by Judge 
Turner. With such an array of evidence to support the case 
of the would-be thief the judge felt inclined to establish the 
ruling of the court below. 

It so happened a public holiday occurred next day and the 
judge took his gun to shoot some pheasants. He wandered near 
a village and asking its name, he remembered that this was one 
of the villages on the estate whose ownership he was trying. 

He called a man and questioned him as to the rotation of 
crops in certain fields in sight, of which he made careful notes. 
Next day when court was convened he recalled some of the wit- 
nesses and examined them. They soon revealed their ignorance 
of the facts of the estate. This was the means of disclosing the 
whole fraud and securing the rightful owner. 

Bombay is the rendezvous of the Parsees. Here eighty 
thousand of this peculiar people reside permanently. I trav- 
elled with one of them from Singapore in my cabin and when 
he removed his silken coat to wash his hands before meals he 
took off from around his neck a gray cord something like one 
of our watch guards only it carried no watch. 

He remained standing silently holding the cord with both 
hands. I ventured one day to ask him, "What are you doing?" 
He then showed me a prayer book with some admirable Collects, 
one of which he said when he washed his hands. He prayed 
that as he was about to clean his hands so might the Eternal 
Spirit clean his soul. 

It was a remarkable sight on the strath at Bombay as the 



102 Recollections and Reflections 

sun was setting, to see hundreds of them with prayer books in 
their hands saying their evening devotions, as the King of day 
dipped beneath the horizon. Then they gathered in family 
groups surrounding a lantern by whose light they played games 
similar to chess. 

It is very remarkable to find eighty thousand absolutely 
clean and moral people amidst the extraordinary immorality of 
an idolatrous country. Few people conceive the impurity of 
the very atmosphere of India. 

The Hindu editor of a native paper lately wrote : "Abomi- 
nation worship is the main ingredient of modern Hinduism. 
Our priesthood is the mainstay of every unholy, immoral and 
cruel superstition and custom. Our temples are a festering 
mass of vice." 

The Lord Bishop, Dr. Douglass and the Archdeacon 
would have me preach on Easter Sunday in the Cathedral. It 
was a curious sight to see punkhas swinging from one side to 
the other of the long Nave being pulled by men outside. The 
pulpit was new and it had not been provided with the inevitable 
fan. I was never so hot in my life ; and when I had finished I 
could not have had a dry thread upon me. The Bishop wore 
his scarlet Convocation robes and I wondered if he wore any- 
thing else. 

His chaplain, Mr. Spear, who had been in India twenty-six 
years, was kneeling on the chancel step to my right. I turned 
slightly to see how he was getting on. There was a pool of 
water on the next higher step which had run off from the top 
of his head and I said to myself, "If he has been melting like 
that for twenty-six years I can stand it for twenty-six hours." 

Hot as was Bombay Cathedral it was not so exacting as the 
Eed Sea, but people whose avocations require them to live in 
the torrid zone adopt all kinds of expedients to render life com- 
fortable, and in the main they succeed. 

There were many attractions to while away the monotony 



Hindu Peculiarities 103 

of a perfectly smooth passage. At night the sea was filled with 
phosphorescent medusae, and the wake of the steamer was often 
a sea of fire; and the dew was a marvel, the awnings would 
pour with water as if a furious rain was falling from a cloud- 
less sky. 

A cable at Aden bid me hurry home, for as it turned out 
I had left my school to the care of a knave and my church to a 
fool and it was only by the consummate skill of my dear wife 
that things were held together. 

But, through God's boundless mercy, I reached Blackheath 
in perfect health on the 4th of May, 1873, and with the reins 
in hand the chariot righted and things went on once more 
prosperously. 



CHAPTER XIV. 
On to Denver. 

In a letter from my dear friend, Mr. Charles D. Cobb, he 
says: "On this side the Atlantic all the indications of Provi- 
dence point toward you and seem to favor your coming. You, 
an entire stranger and foreigner, visiting us briefly, have been 
held in almost affectionate memory for six or seven years, and 
your name is first upon the lips of all those who then met or 
heard you, whenever the question of a Rector comes up. We 
knew not whether you were living or dead, married or single, 
'High' or 'Low/ famous or obscure, but the feeling was unani- 
mous and almost an ardent longing." 

Every now and then someone would write to me about my 
returning. I received a long letter from a Mr. Hiller, who 
sent it to McMillan — he had seen an article of mine in one of 
McMillan's magazines — and it was forwarded to me by that 
publishing firm. Finally the vestry made a deliberate attempt. 
They wrote to the Bishop of London, who appears to have 
given them a flattering account of me and my doings. He sent 
on their letter to my bishop, the Bishop of Rochester, who re- 
plied : 

"The Bishop of Rochester presents his compliments to Mr. 
Cobb. The Bishop of London has sent him Mr. Cobb's letter, 
with reference to Mr. Martyn Hart, who lives in the Diocese of 
Rochester, and the Bishop, to save everybody concerned trouble, 
has thought it advisable to sound Mr. Hart as to his readiness 
to cross the Atlantic in case an invitation should reach him 
from the Churchman of Denver. 

104 



On to Denver 105 

Mr. Hart, while feeling much gratified by the kindly recol- 
lection entertained of him, prefers to remain in his native 
country." 

Humanly it seemed an absurd thing to contemplate. I 
was the Head of a lucrative school, and I had a flourishing con- 
gregation of the kindest people possible. Among them they 
had every luxury; game preserves, trout streams, yachts, sea- 
side houses, all of which I was welcome to share with them. 
And more than all a young family of six children and all our 
kith and kin in England. I do not wonder that when it came 
to my actual starting, the manager of the Joint Stock Bank, 
the largest bank in London, urged my dear friend and Church- 
warden, Mr. Pembroke, to go with him to a Master in Lunacy 
and get an order to lock me up in an asylum for six months 
until I came to rny senses ! But I was an officer in a big army 
and I became convinced that I had received orders to go to 
Denver, and I was thankful that the order had not been the 
centre of Africa. 

On the 8th of May, 1879, the vestry gave me a definite 
"call," and offered me a salary of $4,000 a year — double what 
they had been accustomed to give. Some of my London friends, 
notably Mr. Petter, the publisher, had taken a hand to see that 
1 was secure of a sufficient income to live upon ; and then Bishop 
Spalding finding I was not altogether averse to coming, wrote 
voluminously assuring me of success, a new church, and $8,000 
a year if I needed it ! He saw in my coming a hope of estab- 
lishing a Cathedral system which an unfortunate disagreement 
with my predecessor had prevented. The Bishop's plan sounded 
to me eminently sensible. It was indeed a return to the medie- 
val system, when the Church was at the zenith of her power and 
usefulness. Its main device was the governance of the Church 
by a Bishop and Chapter, which anybody could see would be 
more likely to be wisely governed — "for in a multitude of coun- 
sellors there is wisdom'' — than if everything emanated from 



106 Recollections and Reflections 

the Bishop himself. And then in those days of missionary zeal, 
a staff of priests maintained at the Cathedral centre could work 
outlying missions which were too weak to support a clergyman 
of their own. This seemed to me a plan admirably adapted for 
a new country being rapidly populated, so I intimated to the 
Bishop that anything I could do to further such a project I 
would and lend it all my devotion and energy. 

I was to be the Dean. 

We all of us argue from the knowledge of our surround- 
ings. Indeed, Locke's philosophy has always been accepted— 
that all our ideas come from sensation and reflection — and 
therefore, I having the sensation of knowing certain Deans in 
England, naturally supposed that the ecclesiastical dignity was 
equally well known and established in the American Church. 
Little did I think that the title was a novelty and only one or 
two venturesome clergymen dared to assume it. And even 
now, after some thirty Deans have come into existence, who are 
the Hectors of edifices some of them quite comparable with the 
cathedrals of the Old World, the Church speaking through the 
General Convention professes itself blind as regards Deans. 
The late Dean Grosvenor, who would have presided over the 
fourth Cathedral in the world, as regards size, was never given 
his title in the legal assemblies of the Church. 

For many years I was the butt of Eastern dignitaries, and 
often would I have disclaimed any wish to retain a title I never 
coveted but which was imposed upon me by the Bishop as part 
of his scheme, only an Englishman is sometimes likened to a 
bull-dog, who even if he seizes a rag with his teeth refuses to 
let go. I shall have a good deal to say about this Cathedral 
system later on. 

In May, 1879, the Vestry cabled, "Draw five hundred dol- 
lars and come and see us." Now whenever anybody tells me 
to draw such a sum I have an imperative desire to do it, so I 
immediately set out, and was here for ten days in June. Two 



On to Denver 107 

notable men died that week: Cardinal Manning, and Prince 
Napoleon, who was killed by the Zulus. I now confess that I came 
with a strong hope that I should find some insuperable obstacle 
to my leaving London and coming here to reside, but I could 
find none save loss of income. Everybody was as kind as possible. 
People were arriving in Denver literally by thousands, and sub- 
scriptions which sounded to me very large, for building the 
new Church, were offered on every hand. The field was enor- 
mous and "white already for the harvest," and what could I do 
but say that as soon as I could find a suitable man to take my 
School, and Church, I would weigh anchor and set sail. 

On my way out to Denver I stayed for a Sunday with a 
Mr. Stevens, on Long Island, with whom I had made acquaint- 
ance on the voyage to China. I wanted to take counsel with 
him as to the propriety of my making the change. On Sunday 
he took me to their little Union Church, where the service was 
conducted by George William Curtis. We sang a hymn or 
two, then he read a portion of Scripture, then he proposed silent 
prayer, while a ditty was played on a very indifferent organ; 
then he read a sermon, I think by Dr. Arnold. After service 
Mr. Stevens introduced me to Mr. Curtis, who was anxious to 
know what I thought of the service. I told him I should de- 
scribe it as a molluscous service. He said, "Why so describe 
it?" I replied, "Because it had no back-bone — no common 
prayer." Of course Mr. Curtis was a highly educated man, very 
much of the Matthew Arnold type. 

I sailed home in the Britannic, with Captain Edward 
Smith, with whom I became very friendly. One day standing 
on the bridge, we were in the neighborhood of ice and I asked 
him what his custom was in such water? He said, "I go as 
fast as I can for by so doing I shorten the time of danger, and 
if we are so unfortunate as to strike a 'berg, it would only be a 
matter of three minutes difference in going down, between low 
speed and high speed." He had evidently held to his custom 



108 Recollections and Reflections 

when he Captained the Titanic, and went to the bottom with 
that palatial ship. 

Never have I doubted for a single moment that my coming 
to Denver was "of the Lord," for I soon found a very learned 
man who had been the headmaster of the Naval School at 
Greenwich, where they had six hundred boys, to whom with a 
quiet conscience I could leave my School, and my Church. I 
need not say it was a tearing up of the roots, but the people 
insisted on paying our way with three hundred guineas; and 
after a safe journey, eleven of us — six children, a governess, and 
two maids — arrived in Denver on a Saturday, which was 
Michaelmas Day, 1879 ; and we at once experienced the thought- 
ful kindness of our new American friends, for they had taken 
a furnished house for us, spread an ample dinner, and left us 
to ourselves. 

I very soon had an experience of the strange vagaries of the 
American press, its extraordinary irresponsibility and utter 
recklessness. I have often chided a reporter for their want of 
accuracy and indeed patent truth, and I am generally met with 
the astounding assertion: "My editor doesn't care for truth, he 
wants interest." 

We had a very large house at Blackheath, as is essential for 
a household of some hundred, so when the children found them- 
selves in a small, compact house, they were delighted with the 
change — for change is one of the pleasures of life — and they 
compared it to a doll's house, which is the ideal pleasure of 
every nursery. In a few weeks somebody sent me an Eastern 
paper which said that the Church people of Denver had imported 
a minister from London, and had housed him and his family 
as they thought pleasantly enough, but which his children de- 
scribed as a "dog's house" ! 

I have often had to bear vituperation from the newspapers, 
but I consoled myself with the satisfactory reflection that I 
have never lost an opportunity of "putting their sins in the 



On to Denver 109 

light of their countenance/' and I flatter myself that at least 
in Denver, my constant criticisms have not been without effect. 
The newspapers nowadays are much more careful as to accuracy 
than they were thirty years ago. 

I found everybody kindness itself, and only too willing to 
bear with the peculiarities and idiosyncrasies of foreigners. 
Bishop Spalding was as delighted as anybody at my arrival, 
and in a day or two gave me a document written with his own 
hand and sealed with the large Episcopal seal, by which he 
evidently intended to put into authoritative form his sugges- 
tions for the working of the city from a Cathedral centre which 
he had elaborated in his correspondence with me. It is worth 
quoting : 

"In the Name of God, Amen. 

"It being understood and agreed that St. John's Church, 
Denver, shall be the Cathedral Parish and that the new St. 
John's Church to be erected thereby shall be the Cathedral 
Church of the City of Denver and Jurisdiction or Diocese of 
which Denver shall be the See City, therefore we, John F. 
Spalding, D.D. by Divine permission Bishop holding and exer- 
cising Jurisdiction in the said City and in the State of Colo- 
rado, do on condition of said understanding and agreement, 
appoint our well-beloved, the Rev. H. Martyn Hart, M.A., Rec- 
tor Elect of the said Church to be the Dean of the Cathedral and 
of the City of Denver, and Rural Dean of the Deanery of Den- 
ver embracing Northern Colorado; and saving and reserving 
all our rights, privileges, powers and prerogatives as Bishop of 
the said City and Jurisdiction, do assign and grant unto the 
said Rev. H. Martyn Hart, M.A., as Dean aforesaid, the chief 
place and pre-eminence in the conduct and management of the 
Missions and Mission work of the said City and vicinity and 
among the Trustees of the Cathedral Schools, Wolfe Hall, Jar- 
vis Hall, and the Denver Theological School composing and 
constituting the Cathedral Chapter. And we appoint him, the 



110 Recollections and Reflections 

said Rev. H. Martyn Hart, M.A., Professor, Teacher and Lec- 
turer in the said Schools, it resting in his discretion to give 
such time and attention to these duties as he shall think fit ; the 
object of said appointment being to unite all our Parochial, 
Missionary, Educational and Charitable work in and in the 
vicinity of the City of Denver under a thoroughly effective 
Cathedral System and organization, to the building up and 
strengthening of the said St. John's Parish and the work of 
the Church in all its branches in the See City and the Juris- 
diction or Diocese. 

"Given under our hand and Episcopal Seal, this second 
day of October in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hun- 
dred and seventy-nine and in the sixth year of our Episcopacy. 

"John Franklin S'paldin'g, 
"Bishop of Denver and Colorado," 

A Mission is the seedling of a Parish, and of course by 
giving me control over the missions I had the direction of the 
stream at the fountain-head. There were then two missions in 
the city — Emmanuel and Trinity — the former is a mission yet, 
none of its numerous Vicars have been able to make it stand on 
its own legs as a parish. Trinity was in the outskirts of the 
city in a northerly direction. I did what I could for both of 
them ; held a Bible class every week in Emmanuel, and preached 
every Sunday afternoon in the other. I soon became aware of 
the attitude of the resident clergy. They were in no mood to 
take the slightest direction from me, and the Bishop, who was 
really a kindly man and averse to anything approaching co- 
ercion, never liked to interfere, nor indeed did he ever tell 
them that he had given me the ecclesiastical authority over 
the city. No wonder therefore was it that they looked upon 
my ministry in their Churches as an intrusion. I noticed that 
the gentleman in charge of Trinity would go up to the altar 
immediately at the close of the service and empty out the few 



On to Denver 111 

coins in the alms plate and put them in his pocket, and I 
began to suspect that he did this fearful that I should appro- 
priate them if they were brought as usual into the vestry. I 
very soon found that to carry out the Bishop's idea of a Cathe- 
dral system would be a very difficult, if not an impossible, thing, 
owing to the opposition of the clergy. I therefore turned my 
attention to building the Cathedral. 



CHAPTER XV. 

My First Marriage Ceremony. 

Of course I enquired under what conditions a marriage 
could be performed. I found it was the law of the Church that 
the innocent party to a divorce might be married again, but to 
decide that question the Court records must be produced and 
the permission of the Bishop secured; and it was the law of 
the State, that there could not be a marriage between first 
cousins. 

I went down to the church on the first Thursday night after 
my arrival, for choir practice. I was met at the door by a tall 
Scotchman who asked if I was the minister. He said two of 
his friends wished to be married. I asked where they were, and 
pointing with his thumb over his shoulder into the church, said, 
"Right here." 

On entering I found the happy couple, a small man with 
gold spectacles, about forty, and a lady to match of large dimen- 
sions, clad in an ulster. 

I bowed and asked if they had been divorced or if they 
were cousins. The bridegroom answering me in the negative, 
I intimated if they would place themselves before the altar rails 
I would vest myself and perform the ceremony. The little 
vestry was a corner shut off by the organ and having a door out 
into the street, my predecessor calling it "The Cave of the 
Winds." 

On presenting myself before the couple, I commenced the 
Service. I remember her name was Formosa. All went in an 



112 



My First Marriage Ceremony 113 

ordinary manner until I reached the vow of the woman, "Wilt 
thou love, honor and obey." Then the scene was changed. 

She thrust her arm out its full length with her forefinger 
within an inch of my nose. She had her fingers covered with 
diamond rings and so startled was I that I thought she had a 
six-shooter and I remember saying to myself, "If ever you were 
brave, now is your time," and dropping my eye upon her hand 
1 somewhat recovered my nerve. With the movement she said 
very emphatically, "I object to that word." We remained in 
statu quo, a kind of tableau vivant, and I said, "Madam, unless 
you say the word I shall not proceed with the Service." 

The Scotchman attempted to break the deadlock. "You 
know Sir, they sometimes object to that word in the old coun- 
try." "That may be," I said, "but unless you say the word, I 
cannot proceed with the Service." Then the bridegroom inter- 
vened, "If you say the word, Dear, I shall not exact the prom- 
ise." Then she said, "Under those circumstances I say 'Obey/ " 
with a wag of her finger. 

I have before remarked in these Eeminiscences, how sing- 
ular a thing it is that a vein of evil or at least disturbance often 
seems to run through the history of a person or even a thing. 

It was eminently so in this case. When we retired to the 
Vestry, I looked about for a Record book, which was not there, 
but in the drawer of the little wash-hand stand there was a 
form of Certificate which I filled in, according to its directions 

"What am I to do with this I wonder ?" Our Scotch friend 
replied, "You'll have to record it at the Recorder's office, which 
I shall be pleased to do if you will give it to me." And with 
that he put it in his pocket and the party departed. 

It may have been a year or two afterwards that I was going 
East and I found myself in the Pullman car at Pueblo. In those 
days the Pullman cars were dark and gloomy, especially when 
standing in a depot. A gentleman motioned to me and I fol- 
lowed him to the end of the car where you washed your hands. 



114 Recollections and Reflections 

I then saw that it was Dr. Hoffman, the quondam bridegroom. 
"Have you Mrs. Hoffman with you, Doctor ?" "Yes, she is in 
there," pointing with his thumb over his shoulder. "You're 
going to Kansas City, Dean? She'll die before you get there, 
for she has a very enlarged heart, do you mind sending me a wire 
to say she is dead?" 

"But my dear Sir, under such circumstances, you surely 
ought to accompany her." "No, I have some particular busi- 
ness to attend to in Pueblo, and I really can't, here's my card, 
Dean" ; and with that he was off the train. 

Going back into the car I found the lady and squeezed my- 
self into the little room in the seat she left me, for her shadow 
had not grown any less since our first meeting. After some 
casual greetings, I asked where she had the brandy bottle. She 
pointed to her satchel, which she opened and I satisfied myself 
that it was handy. 

I grieve to say that her language was very far from that 
which you would expect from a person in the imminent danger 
of death; and do as I would I found myself unable to bring 
her to serious thought. 

Just as we were nearing Kansas City, she was seized with 
a convulsion and was in great danger of collapse, but the brandv 
restored her and I was greatly relieved to leave her, as she said, 
"All right" in the hotel. 

I had not, however, as yet, done with the Hoffman's. It 
was some eight years afterwards, when one day I found a 
stranger looking about the Cathedral. He made some inquiries 
concerning the Chancel windows, then he said, "I see you have 
forgotten me, Dean," and looking at him, it was Dr. Hoffman. 
"Where is she, Doctor?" "I left her at St. Louis, and as she 
knew I was coming through Denver she wanted me to call on 
you and see if she was properly mairied." 

"Never was there a woman more married. I remember 
every detail of that extraordinary service." "But did you record 



My First Marriage Ceremony 115 

the certificate?" "No, do yon not remember that your Scotch 
friend put it in his pocket, saying he would record it?" "Yes, 
so he did," the Doctor replied, "but he went home and shot him- 
self, and I took it out of his pocket and here it is," handing 
me the paper. 

At the bottom of the page there was an intimation in italics 
that if the Minister who performed the ceremony failed to rec- 
ord it within thirty days, he was to be fined and if he persisted 
in his negligence, he was to be imprisoned. 

We had then a Recorder whose reputation for honesty was 
none of the best; I made my appearance in his office the next 
day and remarked, "There are some people in this city who are 
out of jail who ought to be in and there are some in who ought 
to be out." Handing him the paper, I drew his attention to 
the facts it disclosed; that I was badly in need of a rest and 
that if he would see, with as little publicity as possible, that I 
went to jail for the prescribed time, I would gladly go at 
the expense of the State. Since then I have entirely lost sight 
of the Hoffmans. 



CHAPTEE XVI. 

The Building of the First Cathedral. 

When it was noised abroad that we were about to build a 
Cathedral I received a letter from an English lady residing in 
the East, which warned me to be careful, for I should find that 
promises made here were not as sure of realization as they were 
in England. But I gratefully bear my friends in Denver wit- 
ness, that, with one solitary exception, every promise or under- 
taking has been duly ratified and they have in one way or an- 
other supplied nearly half a million for the Lord's work. 

Now I look back at the building of the Cathedral it aston- 
ishes me how easily it was done. It will be remembered that 
my predecessor resigned when he found himself unable to secure 
subscriptions amounting to $10,000, and when we opened the 
Cathedral within two years of its inception we had spent $120,- 
000, of which we only owed $25,000. The present Cathedral 
with the land and Chapter House cost some $360,000, of which 
we owe about $80,000 and the prospect of its liquidation is well 
in sight. 

The Bishop had acquired the property which was after- 
wards the Cathedral Close, by purchasing a note of $2,000, then 
secured by this land and owned by the widow of a pioneer. The 
Bishop foreclosed and so became the owner of the property. He 
offered part of this land as a site for the new Cathedral on cer- 
tain conditions which were elaborated in what was known as 
"The Cathedral Deed," in the third clause of which was detailed 
the rights that the Bishop of the Diocese should have in the 
Cathedral. In other words, it was an attempt to draw a line 

116 



The Building of the First Cathedral 117 

between the uses of the edifice as a Cathedral, and a Parish 
Church. When this document was presented to the Vestry they 
declined in toto to accept it. Three Judges of the Supreme 
Court were then Vestrymen, and it was referred to them to 
phrase Article III so as to bring it within the wishes of the 
Vestry. 

The Bishop very reluctantly accepted the alteration they 
made. 

The plans of the Cathedral were then adopted; the bid of 
the contractor was accepted; and we only waited for the signa- 
ture of the Bishop to the deed for the work to commence. 

The Bishop signed the deed in the presence of the Chancel- 
lor on a Friday morning, but in his mail that day there came 
an Eastern paper with a violent attack on Cathedral systems, 
and it was plainly levelled against Colorado. This so upset him 
that he forgot to record the deed. It was the middle of sum- 
Tier, and one of the Vestry had kindly built me a cottage near 
nis own in a mountain park. Knowing that the deed was 
signed, I asked the Vestry to have a meeting on Monday night, 
which it was unnecessary for me to attend, to sign the contracts 
for the building of the Cathedral, and let the work commence. 

On the following Wednesday, my friend came to the park, 
and I learned to my surprise that they declined to sign the 
contracts because the Bishop had not recorded the deed. But 
the Vestry telegraphed to the Bishop to tell him that if he did 
not choose to record the deed and so satisfy and complete the 
agreement, they would abandon the whole Cathedral project and 
build a Parish Church of their own on a site they owned in the 
middle of the town ; but the Bishop hastened to repair the over- 
sight by authorizing his safe to be opened, telegraphing the 
combination; so the deed was recorded, the contracts signed, 
and the building of the Cathedral commenced. 

I have seen many a cornerstone laying, but I never saw 
such a ceremony as that with which the cornerstone of the first 



118 Recollections and Reflections 

Cathedral was laid. We invited all the secret orders in the 
city, Protestant and Roman Catholic and those of no religion. 

As I happened to be the Chaplain of the Artillery Company 
and of the Firemen, I asked those companies to dignify the oc- 
casion, one to run the Stars and Stripes up the flagstaff and 
the other to fire a salute at the placing of the stone. The 
Sheriff was asked to be the Marshal of the day. He issued his 
orders in a couple of columns in the evening paper and direc- 
tions on which streets the various members of the procession 
were to form. 

The whole city was alive. The Marshal and his Aides in 
all the uniforms they could beg, or borrow, galloping down the 
main thoroughfares to regulate the procession. We had hired 
the seats of a traveling circus and erected them on the higher 
ground above the site of the cornerstone. 

Mr. Marchant in his college cap, cassock and cotta with the 
picturesque hood of an Oxford Mus. Bac. directed the music, 
beating time for the band and the chorus. A discharge of fire- 
arms set the procession in motion. Masons, Odd Fellows, 
Knights of Pythias, Firemen, the Artillery with their guns, 
squads of police, a strong array of Churchmen and finally an 
heterogeneous company of Clergy, in all sorts of hats and sur- 
plices, long and short, brought up the rear. 

There must have been a crowd of ten thousand people. 
Bishop Spalding laid the stone, the Stars and Stripes went up, 
the band played, the choir and the congregation sang, the can- 
nons roared and broke the window panes of the nearest cottages. 
There never was such enthusiasm, and Bishop Spalding was so 
elated that he made an address on Cathedral Systems for 
three-quarters of an hour. It was a magnificent day, with a hot 
sun and as he could not be heard by the greater portion of the 
crowd, the crowd naturally melted away, and I, who had been 
hoping for a large offertory found the building fund increased 
by only one hundred and twenty dollars; but it was a glorious 



The Building of the First Cathedral 119 

function and our elation was not to be damped by the smallness 
of the offertory. 

That cornerstone only served its purpose twenty-two years. 
It is now against the Chapter House wall. We found it im- 
possible to incorporate it in any wall of the new Cathedral for 
it was the angle of a hexagonal channel. But we must place 
it in some permanent position, as a matter of record, like as we 
have in the wall of the vestibule, a stone from the foundation 
of Canterbury Cathedral and a stone from a flying buttress of 
Westminster Abbey, built in the reign of King Stephen. 

Very little of the money for the first Cathedral was con- 
tributed from outside the city. Anxious as the Bishop was to 
help he really only contributed $5, which was sent to him by a 
domestic servant in Cleveland. His various appeals only irri- 
tated the Eastern people who wanted to know what a Missionary 
Jurisdiction, on the edge of civilization, had to do with building 
a Cathedral? and it was only natural to the Eastern Clergy to 
suppose that I had some good reason for leaving my native 
country and they looked upon my assumption of the novel title 
of "Dean" and my attempt to build a pretentious Cathedral as 
a piece of impudence; that sooner or later my offence would 
follow me and I should be justly punished by a failure which 
would publicly discredit me. This will explain those frequent 
slights which I silently suffered in those early years, even from 
Bishops, one of the most prominent of whom indicated my sup- 
position was correct, when he wrote to know "out of what gut- 
ter I had come." 

But these things, and frequent offers of Eastern 
Churches, have been easily laid aside by my constant answer, 
that God did not send me to America, but to Denver, and any- 
thing that lay outside Denver was irrelevant. 

The Bishop had recommended a firm of architects in De- 
troit, who had once built for him a church in Erie. Fortunately 
a member of the firm, Mr. Pearce, had been a pupil of Sir 



120 Recollections and Reflections 

Gilbert Scott, and with him I set to work to solve the problem, 
how to build an effective interior with as light containing walls 
as was judicious, with the intention at some future period of 
enclosing them with stone. How satisfactorily he solved the 
problem may be gathered from the fact that years afterwards, 
when we had completed a scheme of decoration suggested by 
Mr. Frampton, in five reds, the pews being black, Bishop Potter, 
standing at the end of the Cathedral, said that it was the most 
effective church that he had ever seen. 

This Cathedral served its purpose for twenty-one years, 
when an incendiary set it on fire, out of a political grudge. Every 
window was filled with stained glass; all, with one exception, 
from the studio of Mr. Edward Frampton of London. The East 
Window was as beautiful a production as I have ever seen — a 
representation of the Crucifixion — for which the artist went 
over to Antwerp and copied Van Dyke's, "Christ." The figure 
of Our Lord wonderfully portrayed triumph over pain. The 
window was eleven feet wide, without a mullion, and twenty- 
six feet high. To our untold regret it was the only window that 
melted in the fire. 

The Cathedral was fourteen months in building and was 
opened for service on November 6, 1882. In this interim the 
prospects of founding a Cathedral System had become far 
clearer. Here is a letter detailing Bishop Spalding's plans: 

Bishop's House, 

410 Champa Street, 
Denver, Col, March 7, 1881. 
My dear Dean- 

Will you be so kind as to see that the bids are all in for All 
Saints', N. Denver by Thursday of next week, so that on that 
day a meeting of the Committee may be held and contracts 
made. If the cost is found to be too great, the plans will have 
to be simplified and new bids asked for, unless the subscriptions 



The Building of the First Cathedral 121 

can be greatly increased. I have but $1,100. We should have a 
Chapter Meeting to agree on contracts. 

The work of securing annual members and life members of 
the Hospital Society and organizing Ladies' Hospital Aid So- 
cieties of these ought at once to be done. Would it not be well, 
after interesting a few of the ladies and determining upon the 
plan, to speak of the matter from the Chancel Sunday morning? 

I appoint Thursday in Holy Week, for the Ordination to 
Diaconate of Mr. Henry Mitchell 11 A. M. I will probably 
preach or ask some one of the Clergy to do so, and celebrate 
Holy Communion which, of course, is part of the Ordination 
Service. Mr. Mitchell will have to be examined by the Examining 
Chaplains, early in Holy Week. He goes to Pitkin. Battiscombe 
might be Ordained on Trinity Sunday. But the $300 per annum 
we cannot get after his Ordination. We shall have to send him 
to a mining camp like Kokomo, shall we not? and let him take 
his chances as to support on the principle, "the laborer is worthy 
of his hire." Every dollar of the appropriation of the Mission- 
ary Board is in use, and I am pledged for a good deal more. 
The only remedy I see is to bring our congregations to share the 
burden of Missionary support. 

Can you not in the next two months make out a complete 
list of the Communicants of St. John's? The families repre- 
sented by pewholders do not probably represent half of them. 
Every Communicant ought to give something to the Cathedral. 
Every baptized person ought. Ought not every one to subscribe 
something for the Missions of the Church? The Shepherd knows 
his sheep and calls each by name. They know his voice when 
he tells each their duty. Not for a long time have I been so 
anxious as now about the working of the Cathedral plan. Never 
have I felt more the need of your strong help and co-operation. 

Do you know that the Trinity laymen were very indignant 
at the "assumption' involved in the title to the Lent Card; 
"The Parish of Denver." It would take but a slight further "pro- 



122 Recollections and Reflections 

vocation' to lead them to incorporate Trinity as a Parish. I 
forbid it, of course. But suppose they do it under the provisions 
of the civil laws? We would have no remedy. Notwithstanding 
my prohibitions I should have to recognize the Trinity Parish 
as such, after a fight and consequent alienation from you and 
me; and by and by Emmanuel and I don't koow how many 
others. There is, in my judgment, but one way to prevent this 
and secure unity of church work in Denver. It is to carry out 
in good faith the plan marked out in the Charter of the Cathe- 
dral Chapter and embodied in the deed to the Cathedral lots. 
Under this plan we can have, and will have, only one Parish, 
and that the Cathedral Parish in Denver and Arapahoe County. 

Obviously that cannot be the Parish or such a Parish as St. 
Johns Vestry represents. It cannot be one congregational 
Parish. St. Johns Parish in the old American or the English 
sense can represent only two or three central wards of the city. 
And Trinity will, rightly or wrongly, represent equally, the 
Fifth Ward, and Emmanuel the First, or West Denver. If the 
Rector and Vestry, or either, interfere in what Marshall calls 
already " Trinity Parish" there will be trouble such as you have 
not anticipated. 

The idea of incorporating Trinity on the part of its laymen 
comes from the feeling they have, that you mean by "The 
Parish of Denver" a Parish in the English sense, or that the cor- 
poration of "the Rector, Wardens and Vestry of St. John's" 
claims jurisdiction outside its proper parochial district. They 
erroneously think that you desire that the Clergy in Denver, 
working in the several districts outside of St. John's shall be 
your Curates or Assistants appointed by your concurrence and 
responsible to you. 

Now I think that if you or I ever had such an idea, you 
must see by this time, that it will not work. To attempt to work 
it will lead to fearful jealousies, opposition and incorporated 
disunion. How are we then to make Denver one Parish? Only 



The Building of the First Cathedral 123 

by making it a Cathedral Parish as distinguished from a Parish 
as defined in our Canons. By making it what an ancient Paroikia 
was. There will be inevitably a number of self -supporting con- 
gregations in Denver. These will not, you may be sure, allow 
themselves to be put in an inferior position nor will the Pastors 
in charge of them be put below the independent Rectors of 
country Parishes. They will rebel against any such subordina- 
tion. Therefore they and their Pastors' must be allowed a cer- 
tain independence in their particular districts. We must allow 
what we cannot help and make the most of it, make it a part of 
our plan. This is what I had done in our Cathedral Corporation. 
All the Clergy in charge of self-sustaining congregations or 
schools, in Priests' Orders were to be Canons, not Curates. The 
Dean was to be among them Primus inter pares. They may have 
nothing to do with the parochial services of St. John's in the 
Canonical sense of parochial. But they were to have their part 
in the services aver and above these, the services of the Church 
of the Paroikia, or the Cathedral services. There should be a Sun- 
day afternoon Cathedral service in which the Canons, Resident 
and Honorary, should preach in turn. There should be a Ca- 
thedral daily service morning and evening, in which the Canons 
should all take their courses. Each Canon should have his stall, 
his place and work in the Cathedral. In this way the city Clergy 
will be honored above the country Clergy. Their congregations 
will be proud to have their Clergy thus holding Canonries. Thus 
we can bind the Clergy together as one man in the work of the 
city, parochial and educational. This is all provided for. This 
is the plan as laid down and as begun on your arrival in Denver, 
and you being appointed Dean, and Haynes, Canon, to be put in 
operation. The most important position outside your own is 
doubtless the Headship of the Cathedral School for Boys. It 
includes a Canonry. The second in importance is the Headship 
of Trinity. Then South Denver, etc. The person who may hold 
any one of these positions may not be here next year. But while 



124 Recollections and Reflections 

he holds it and by reason of holding it he is a great man. The 
place gives him dignity and importance, I know this; by making 
the men great and their work important that I have around me, 
I make myself the greater, and I secure loyal obedience from 
them. If I make them small, I am brought down to a lower 
level by the jealousies and piques, and hatreds in which as small 
men they will surely indulge against me and against each other. 

It is no small thing that we have got the right nomencla- 
ture, so far as "Cathedral," and "Dean' are concerned. This is 
a very great gain. But even this is imperfect without the 
"Canons." Marshall is entitled to be a Canon. I appoint him, 
I am sure with your cordial approval; thus we have two. He 
will be the Senior Canon if there should be a change in the 
Principalship of Jarvis Hall. There will be a change when we 
can get a better man, not sooner I trust. 

Noiv I beg of you not to let likes and dislilces have anything 
to do with mens official station and rank, and help me to keep 
Denver one Pariokia by binding the Clergy together in and 
around the See. Help to get "the public" as familiar with the 
term Canon as they are with Dean. Help to give the Canons 
Cathedral work over and above what they are now doing, 
I am ever affectionately yours, 

J. F. Spalding. 

The opposing element referred to in this letter was evidently 
easting a shadow of disturbance on the Bishop's mind. His 
fear was by no means groundless, for the same opposition to his 
Cathedral System, in later years considerably flavored by that 
jealousy which is the bane of our profession, has on more occa- 
sions than one wrought disunion and disaster in the Diocese. 
There was no reason, but for this cause, why the Wolcott School 
should not have been in Wolfe Hall and the majority of the 
daughters of our leading citizens would have been educated 
under the shadow of the Cathedral, and instructed in a religious 
curriculum ordered by the Bishop. 



The Building of the First Cathedral 125 

Unfortunately the Bishop himself, finding from these 
causes the un workability of his scheme^ tacitly abandoned it. 
His defection was gradual and the resultant of the irritating- 
advice of the opposing clergy. 

I remember hearing a very eminent man once s&y, "If you 
plough on straight you are sure to plough out the moles;*' I 
ploughed on straight, and having no object in view except "doing 
the next thing" which God placed at my hand, I had no occa- 
sion to trouble myself with intrigues or politics. 



CHAPTER XVII. 

St. Mark's 

I discovered in early days the impossibility of living in what 
was practically a foreign country where they spoke the same 
language, on anything like the income on which a native could 
live, but fortunately I had brought with me a little money and I 
calculated with precision I have often since wondered at, 
that I must spend $15,000 at least, to supplement the $4,000, I 
received from the Vestry before I should be able to get $6,000 a 
year from an enlarged congregation upon which income I could 
live and give. 

The Bishop offered two church lots within what constituted 
the Cathedral Close, on which I built the Deanery, with $6,000 
of my own money and $4,000 I borrowed. Twentieth street 
stopped abruptly at my garden fence, and in order to prevent its 
extension, the Bishop had built a large wooden building in 
the path of the street on the east side of the Close. In this 
was the Boys' School, Jarvis Hall. The school had had a fitful 
existence, and finally was about to be closed as a failure. With 
all my school experience, and my children away in England, it 
looked as if this was "the next thing," so I proffered my ser- 
vices to the Chapter, which I need hardly say were eagerly 
accepted. I explained to the Bishop how there were plenty of 
excellent men in England, schoolmasters, who would willingly 
come over if they had a prospect of being ordained, which, for 
want of a University degree, was all but an impossibility in 
England. The Bishop was, of course, willing to ordain proper 
and suitable men, and in due time five arrived as Masters in 

126 



St. Mark's 127 

Jarvis Hall. My friend, Mr. Konntze, the banker, lent me 
$2,000 to make the frame building habitable. We let the Dean- 
ery, giving its rent to the support of the school, and I per- 
suaded Mrs. Hart to live in a cottage in the Close, and work 
the household of Masters and boarders as we had done in Black- 
heath. We got some sixty boys; worked hard — I taught many 
hours a day myself — we sent some of the boys to the Eastern 
colleges but the majority were the residuum of the public 
schools, and we attempted to do the impossible thing, of "mak- 
ing a silk purse out of a sow's ear." 

Finding that the income of the school promised to pay 
nothing but its current expenses, I determined to go East on a 
lecturing tour to earn enough money to pay back the $2,000 I 
had borrowed. I provided myself with a first rate stereopticon 
and a set of slides on English Cathedrals and Gothic Archi- 
tecture; paid my own expenses and those of the operator of 
the stereopticon that I took with me, but I only realized $1,479. 
I wrote to the Bishop chatty letters every day or two, telling him 
of my doings. In one of his letters to me he says: "We miss 
you very much. I did not know how much comfort there was in 
very frequent dropping in to see me." 

Now, it seems to be a temptation which apparently no 
Bishop can resist, to build a church on the slightest provoca- 
tion. It has always appeared to me to be reasonable never to 
build a church in a neighborhood which will not supply a con- 
gregation of at least three hundred ; a smaller church under the 
most favorable circumstances cannot adequately support its 
Pastor and must prove an incubus on the Diocese. And then 
the Bishop's agreement with me seemed to make it impossible 
that he should have fallen so easy a prey to the suggestion of 
the Rector of Trinity to commence a Church within seven blocks 
of the Cathedral, he finding that a Jewish population was en- 
croaching in the district around his church. So when I re- 
turned from my lecturing tour I found the Vestry surprised 



128 Recollections and Reflections 

and indignant that the Bishop should have acquiesced in this 
manoeuvre, and I am afraid that the attitude of the leading 
laity of the town so openly assumed in opposition to his action 
so hurt his amour propre — for the Order of Bishops in those days 
considered themselves of a much higher estate than their pres- 
ent successors — that very unfortunately the Bishop completely 
threw himself into the hands of his bad advisers. 

S. Mark's, which he had lent himself to build under such 
sinister advice, was only seven blocks from the Cathedral ; one of 
the Vestry actually lived next door, and two of them on the 
opposite side of the street. There was still a debt of $25,000 
on the Cathedral and the Vestry very naturally felt that it was 
an unkind and an ungenerous thing to do anything which would 
curtail their resources after the very great self-sacrifices they 
had made in building this great church. We asked the Bishop 
to come to a conference, which, considering that the church 
was actually begun, was a useless thing to do and could be noth- 
ing but a skirmish, with the Bishop on the defensive. 

It was a very curious exhibition of how a man who has done 
something partly under pressure and partly from a wish to do 
it, but well knowing his action was subject to criticism, instead 
of taking a high plane of autocratic assumption, fenced for his 
position with an unskilled hand and with very inadequate 
weapons. 

The leaders of the Cathedral congregation were present, 
and I produced a document which is printed on p. 109 in 
which the Bishop gave me full control over the establishment 
of Missions in Denver. 

Holding the document in my hand and reading the im- 
portant clause, the Bishop replied that he could never have 
given it to me, but on seeing it in his own handwriting, and 
sealed with the Episcopal Seal, he said, "It's against the Can- 
ons/' I replied, "How should I know it was against the 
Canons ?" He said, "You ought to have known, for I sent you 




INTERIOR OF THE CHAPTER HOUSE WHERE WE WORSHIPPED FOR SEVEN YEARS. 



St. Mark's 129 

a volume of the Canons when you were in England." "And 
yet/" I rejoined, "you gave it to me \" 

I think we were all genuinely sorry to see the Bishop so 
hopelessly at a loss, and we felt there was nothing to do but let 
things take their course. So S. Mark's was built; but when the 
little church was ready the Committee declined the services of 
the Eector of Trinity, so his intention was frustrated. 

But this led to a strained situation and the complete aban- 
donment of anything like a Cathedral System, and I must con- 
fess it shook my confidence in the Bishop's sense of justice, not 
to say honor, so that I felt insecure in trusting solely to his 
word that the $6,000 that I had put into the building of the 
Deanery was a safe investment. I had not even a memorandum 
from him that I had advanced the money, he being practically 
the owner of the house since it was built on his land. My 
friend, Mr. Cobb, therefore, asked that the Chapter, in which 
body the Diocesan property had been vested, should give me a 
second mortgage, he holding the first mortgage for his $4,000. 
The Bishop objected, and proposed that the matter should be 
submitted to a committee, which he named. He supplied them 
with half a dozen questions, the first of which was, "Did Dean 
Hart ever put $6,000 into the Deanery?" Very fortunately I 
had preserved the architect's receipts for the money, and as 
these were conclusive proofs that I had advanced the money, the 
committee could not but report that I ought to have either a 
mortgage, or the return of the $6,000. The Bishop objected to 
receiving the report of the committee and nominated two other 
committees, both of which similarly reported. At last the 
Chapter demanded that the report be received, and all voted 
"aye," except Mr. Sorenson, the President of the Standing Com- 
mittee. The Bishop then produced out of his pocket a written 
veto on the action of the Chapter. It is a singular commentary 
on the obstinacy of a prejudiced man, whose assumed preroga- 
tives had been infringed, that I never did get that mortgage 



130 Recollections and Reflections 

from the Bishop and Chapter, but the Vestry subsequently pur- 
chased the land on which the house stood, and they gave me the 
mortgage. 

Of course all this led to an estrangement between the Bishop 
and the Cathedral, and the Vestry felt it incumbent upon them 
to have Clause III in the Cathedral Deed made explicit, so that 
for the future there could possibly be no misunderstanding as 
to the Bishop's rights in their church. They, therefore, sub- 
mitted to the Bishop a very clear and definite statement of what 
rights they were willing to grant him in consideration for the 
site on which the Cathedral stood. It is unnecessary to say 
that the Bishop refused to agree. We sent Mr. Cobb across the 
Continent to the Presiding Bishop, Bishop Williams of Con- 
necticut, and we supposed that it was through his influence that 
on the evening of Shrove Tuesday, the twenty-second of Feb- 
ruary, 1887, the Bishop sent for me and said he was ready to 
sign the deed, and hoped "there would not be undue adulation 
over the victory." 

I suggested he should summon all his Clergy to a Union 
Service, Ash Wednesday evening, at which he preached and we 
all shook hands and buried deep the hatchet. 

It was a matter of great thankfulness that "the God who 
maketh men to be of one mind in a house," so granted us his 
spirit of forgiveness that we were enabled to continue amicably 
our Church life for the next decade as if the strife about S. 
Mark's had never occurred. 

One of those remarkable booms in real estate, which occa- 
sionally inflate a Western town, visited us. The four lots on 
which S. Mark's had been built were sold for $10,000 each — an 
exorbitant price — with $2,000 a new site was purchased two 
blocks further south. Subscriptions for $22,000 were raised 
and the church completed by borrowing another $40,000. For 
the want of strict financial accounting, about this latter sum dis- 



St Mark's 131 

appeared, and when the church was opened it was encumbered 
with a debt of $43,000. 

We cleared off the debt on the Cathedral, decorated the in- 
terior, and gave ourselves to lengthening our cords and strength- 
ening our stakes. 



CHAPTEE XVIII. 

My Doctor s Degree. 

One year in Lent, when I was using a purple stole I wore 
my Master's Hood, the lining of which was blue silk. Our artis- 
tic ladies could not bear to see the blue in close contrast with 
the purple. I offered to leave off the stole, it being an ecclesias- 
tical novelty whose use really only dates from about the Oxford 
Movement, 1845, or I must take my D. D. degree and wear a 
scarlet hood; but as that would cost some $200 I didn't feel 
inclined to make that expenditure for a change of color. A few 
days afterwards a check was sent to me for $200, whereupon I 
wrote to Dr. Salmon, who was then the Provost of Trinity 
College, Dublin, and asked him what I was to do to obtain the 
degree in absentia? He replied that I was to write two Latin 
Sermons, and two English Sermons, and send a cheque for 
£38 6s 8 d. I had not written any Latin composition for years 
and those two Latin Sermons cost me no little trouble. When 
they were finished I put a cheque on my London banker for the 
required sum, on the first page of the Latin Sermon, posted the 
package and registered it. Not hearing a word for three months, 
I wrote again to Dr. Salmon, telling him what I had done. He 
replied by return mail that my package had been duly received, 
that he had handed it to the Eegius Professor of Divinity, who, 
having declared the regulations to have been fulfilled, consigned 
the package to the Senior Proctor; and, said Dr. Salmon, "We 
all three waited for the cheque, and on receipt of your second 
letter I hurried to the Senior Proctor who fortunately had not 
destroyed your sermons and we found the cheque as you had 

132 



My Doctor's Degree 133 

stated. It was a pity that for purposes of economy I suppose, 
you sent the package by Book Post. You will be gazetted as a 
Doctor of Divinity at the Commencement next term." 

They have evidently never read my Latin sermons and I re- 
plied to Dr. Salmon that no one but an Irish gentleman could 
have so gently intimated that my Latin was not worth reading 

So I became a Doctor of Divinity and in 1910 the Univer- 
sity of Denver did me the honor of conferring upon me their 
degree of LL.D., as "The Defender of the Bible," as said the 
Chancellor. 



CHAPTER XIX. 

On Matters Educational. 

Having spent the main years of my life in educational con- 
cerns, it was natural that I could not help criticizing some fea- 
tures of our public school system. In 1870 Mr. W. E. Foster, the 
M. P. for Bradford and one of my father's parishioners, came 
over to this country to familiarize himself with the public school 
system. On his return he persuaded Parliament to adopt the sys- 
tem of Board Schools which is the public school system in vogue 
in this country, with certain modifications. 

The two fundamental defects of the system here are the 
total want of any religious training, except such as the teacher 
may casually impart and the unwieldy size of the lower grades. 

To remedy these two chief flaws of the system I proposed 
making the teaching of the Ten Commandments obligatory. 
Every parent desires that its child should be moral. There are 
and never have been such wonderful and complete rules of 
morality as those which were pronounced to Moses by God's own 
voice. It would be an easier matter of credence to admit that 
they were thus communicated directly from the Divine Mind 
than to believe that such a perfect and unimpeachable code of 
morals, which the philosophy of no nation has ever since equaled, 
not to say superseded, could have been produced by even such 
a man as Moses, at that early stage of human development. 

The Roman Catholics were the only section of the public 
who objected to their introduction into the curriculum of the 
public school system. They did so, because they deliberately 
omit the Second Commandment as it condemns their use of 

134 



On Matters Educational 135 

images. And to preserve the number ten, they divide the Tenth 
Commandment into two, justifying their course by declaring 
the first paragraph '"'Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's house" 
refers to the external act and the rest to the internal intention, 
which excuse is invalidated by our Lord's explanation that the 
Seventh Commandment compassed both the act and the intention. 

So organized is the Eoman Catholic Opposition that any 
definite religious instruction is debarred. And consequently 
crime has increased all over the country. Fifty years ago there 
was one criminal to every three thousand of the population; 
there is now one to every three hundred and last year in Den- 
ver one-thirteenth of the population had actually been arrested. 

Morality is not innate ; it must be specifically taught. The 
knowledge of the Bible which contains and enforces the only 
true morality we possess is fading out of the public mind. A 
teacher in the High School lately said that there was not one of 
his class of forty pupils who knew who Judas Iscariot was ! 

I have always held that it is the duty of the State to see 
that its citizens can read, write and sum, but when this modicum 
of education has been achieved at the public expense, any future 
acquirement should be left to the control of the parent. 

Why should everybody be taxed in order that the children 
of the few may have a college education, or indeed made Doc- 
tors or Lawyers. Only a small proportion of the children of 
the lower grades ever reach the High School and the proportion 
of those who arrive at the University is still less, their advance- 
ment really depending upon the financial capability of their 
parents. Then why should the whole population be taxed for the 
benefit of the few? 

I would arrest the public education at the sixth grade. Let 
those parents who seek for their children an education above 
that grade pay for it. Then take the school funds thus saved 
and quadruple the teachers in the lower grades. So that no 
teacher should have more than twelve pupils in her class. As 



136 Recollections and Reflections 

it is now, thirty or even fifty children are committed to the care 
of one teacher. They can only acquire habits of inattention, 
dilatoriness and not infrequently evasion in various forms. 

I have never yet found a sensible person who did not be- 
moan these two great faults in the public school system and 
agree that my proposals were reasonable. 

But thirty years ago, the school system was the fetish of 
the public. Even the most self-evident criticism brought upon 
me a deluge of abuse. The newspaper clippings in my scrap- 
book preserve a choice assortment of epithets: "A chinless non- 
descript," "an English jockey" (I then rode a horse) "an in- 
grate without sense of courtesy or hospitality." 

One widely circulated monthly stigmatises me as an Eng- 
lishman "who has insulted and lied about us before and will 
do it again and why the devil someone don't pay him and tell 
him to hike home is a colossal outrage. * * * I must express 
surprise, however, at the success this copper-cent cockney as per- 
sistently posing as a prize- jay and yet holding on his job." 

I wrote a pamphlet "The Ten Commandments in the Pub- 
lic Schools." It went through several editions and thousands 
were scattered throughout the country and from time to time the 
press took a liberal notice of it; and I even heard of some 
communities adopting its suggestions; but the agitation died 
down. God seems to have given the country over to "A repro- 
bate "Mind." 

Two of my eminent detractors were Brick Pomeroy and 
Elbert Hubbard. 

One St. Valentine's Day in the early eighties, the atmos- 
pheric conditions were abnormal. The thermometer was some 
20 degrees below zero and the air was rilled with spiculae of ice 
gradually falling earthward. The position of most of the prisms 
must have been perpendicular and the rays of the moon de- 
fracted in them, produced an extraordinary celestial display. 
There was a lunar rainbow and "moon dogs" at the four points 



On Matters Educational 137 

of the horizon, all connected by a ring of light and the rays from 
the "dogs" converging toward the zenith. It was a very extraor- 
dinary sight and one much to be remembered by dwellers in the 
temperate zone. 

I was sent for to visit a dying woman. I found a Mrs. 
Teuton, an English working woman, very near the shore of this 
life. She told me she wanted to leave her savings, two or three 
thousand dollars, to an Episcopal Hospital. I asked her if she 
had made her will. She said she had, and told me to open the 
drawer where she said I would find it. It was in proper form 
and properly signed by two witnesses, but so worded that the 
doctor who had made it would have finally possessed the money. 

I sent a young lawyer and arranged that her wishes should 
be properly carried out by the making of another will. After 
the funeral the doctor and his friends considered themselves 
defrauded of their plunder by priestly interference. 

Brick Pomeroy was then running The Great West. Chiefly 
for his own benefit, he was advertising a mining tunnel and 
kindly allowing small investors to come in on "The Ground 
Floor." The Postmaster told me he was receiving some seven 
thousand dollars a week from domestic servants in the Middle 
West by postofnce orders. 

He was notorious during the war for editing The La Crosse 
Democrat, a "copper-head" paper which unscrupulously de- 
nounced every Northern General. The doctor told his case to 
Mr. Pomeroy and he treated me to the same ruthless castiga- 
tion he had meted out to the Union leaders. 

Article after article charged me with every sin under the 
sun, but one — and finally because I persistently declined to take 
any notice of his diatribes, he organized a choir of newsboys 
sending them along the streets on Sunday morning, chanting a 
Litany of which the refrain was, "From All English Deans, 
Good Lord Deliver Us." Some of the leading business men 
finally silenced him. 



138 Recollections and Reflections 

Elbert Hubbard was a very talented man. He had a re- 
markable command of rich language and if his loose character 
had been controlled by any religion he would have been a pro- 
phet whose voice would have awakened the Wilderness. 

It is no business of mine to describe what is well known of 
his evil doings. Some people might consider me nattered by 
the notice he bestowed upon me in three issues of his paper, 
"The Philistine/' He commenced in the September number, 
1901, in which he said I was an Englishman born in Ireland. 
"Eight children have come to him and all from England; for at 
a great expense he managed to have them born there, all save 
one, that through some caper of the calendar first saw the light 
on the high seas." 

Five years later he again returned to the attack, honoring 
me with six pages of his screed. "Dean Hart's name was origi- 
nally Patrick O'Callighan. He was born at Kilmansee, County 
Cork, in 1841. His father was a driver of a jaunting car, his 
mother a barmaid. * * * By a strange fortune, Patrick 
found work as a butler in a New York family * * * who 
had a private Chapel or Oratory in their house and here the 
young butler turned Curate, spread the prie-dieu, and read 
family prayers in a Bishop's voice. In the morning and during 
the day he attended to his duty as a man-of-all-work," and six 
more pages of this rubbish. 

The last time Elbert Hubbard — before he went down with 
the Lusitania — paid his compliments to me was in an item in the 
spring issue of the Philistine. "These are the days when cir- 
cuses move about the land. The Ringling Brothers have en- 
gaged the services of Dean Tart to open the proceedings with 
prayer." | ! 

The curious thing is that some people believed it; and ap- 
parently one of them who received fifteen votes from his admir- 
ing brethren as coadjutor to Bishop Spalding. 



CHAPTEE XX. 

The Wolfe Hall Episode. 

The failing condition of Wolfe Hall was the occasion of 
another ecclesiastical ferment. 

The Church possessed four lots at the corner of Champa and 
Seventeenth streets, for which Bishop Eandall had given $800. 
Within ten years, during the boom, they were sold for the as- 
tonishing price of $30,000 each. As these lots were the prop- 
erty of Wolfe Hall, with the $120,000, now in the Bishop's 
hands, he decided to build a new Wolfe Hall in the outskirts 
of the city. Unfortunately he consulted me with no genuine 
intention, only occasionally and partially disclosing his plans. 
However, I did beg him to curtail his building plans within 
the limit of the money he had in hand but he gave scant heed, 
lending an ear to more reckless advisers, and when the building 
was finished it was encumbered with a debt of $80,000. 

From its name, Wolfe Hall, it might be supposed that its 
origin was due to the generosity of that great benefactress of 
the Church, Miss Wolfe, but it was her father who gave some 
$2,500 and probably with the expectation of more to come, the 
Hall was dedicated to him; and it is possible that the Bishop 
expected Eastern Churchmen to liquidate the debt. Although 
the school sometimes had as many as eighty boarders, still it 
never could earn more than the interest on the debt, and for 
keeping up the fabric, and pay its running expenses. 

In 1885 I had the pleasure of visiting Senator Wolcott in 
Washington. At this time we were looking for a new Principal 
for Wolfe Hall. I asked Mrs. Wolcott, a lady of great intellec- 

139 



140 Recollections and Reflections 

tual capacity, if she knew of anyone. When she came down to 
breakfast next morning, she said, "I have been considering your 
question, and if you can persuade my sister Anna to take the 
Principalship she will make a success of your school." On re- 
turning to Denver I found Miss Wolcott here and I introduced 
her to the Bishop, and so struck was he with her charming 
personality that he appointed her at once — and for five years 
she continually elevated the standard of Wolfe Hall. But pros- 
perity had fluctuated, and the requirements of the school as its 
efficiency increased naturally heightened the expenses so that 
it was impossible to meet the interest on the debt. 

The Chapter was impecunious, and the foreclosure of the 
school was in prospect, when Mr. Jerome, one of our leading 
lawyers, came to me and said, "We require a private Girls' 
School of this kind, it would be detrimental to the city if Wolfe 
Hall were closed." He then propounded a scheme for making 
a joint stock company which would take over the property, be 
responsible for its liabilities, and conduct the school. The 
shares were to be $250 each, and the Bishop and Canons were 
to have seats on the Directory. The Bishop was to be the 
Visitor and have full control of the religious education; and a 
clause was inserted, that if within five years the Chapter should 
come by sufficient money to recoup "The Wolfe Hall Associa- 
tion*" it should re-enter the property. 

All this arrangement was concluded between the Bishop and 
Mr. Jerome, and I felt that as the sole purpose of the Institution 
was to carry on a high-class Girls' School with religious educa- 
tion, according to the tenets of our Church, as an essential of its 
curriculum; and as the company was wholly composed of the 
leading Churchmen of the Diocese ; and that under the manage- 
ment of the Bishop and Chapter an impasse had been reached, 
this opportunity was everything that the Church could expect. 

I and Mr. Jerome, between us, sold shares to the amount of 
$20,000, which sum was actually in the bank. The Chapter met, 



The Wolfe Hall Episode 141 

and by a vote of 18 to 3 agreed to consummate the transaction, 
adjourning for one week in order that the proper deeds might 
be prepared. The three malcontents were Mr. Parker, the Eev. 
Charles Marshall, and Mr. Bowhay, who believing that the 
Wolfe Hall Trust could not thus be broken and the property 
alienated from the Church, decided to thrwart the will of the 
Bishop and Chapter at the last moment without giving the 
Bishop any opportunity to present the case to the court. When, 
therefore, the Chapter convened the following week, to our as- 
tonishment, an officer of the Court served an injunction to pre- 
vent the Chapter ratifying the will of the Bishop and the ma- 
jority. Whereupon the shareholders demanded their money 
back; formed "The Wolcott School Association;" and estab- 
lished Miss Wolcott in new quarters where ever since from two 
to three hundred of the daughters of the leading families of the 
city have been splendidly educated and the church in Colorado 
suffered the greatest disaster in its history ; for if it had not been 
for this counter-move, the Church, to her enormous advantage, 
would have had the training of the mothers of the leading citi- 
zens of generation to come. 

Another Principal for Wolfe Hall was elected, and Mr. 
Parker declaring in the Council that the school should never be 
closed, utilized his genius for finances in directing its affairs 
and supplying its deficits out of his own pocket; but after ex- 
pending some $26,000 in a futile attempt, he regretted his 
action, withdrew his support, and Wolfe Hall closed its doors. 

The sad part of this history is, if the Bishop's vision had not 
been beclouded, and he had asserted his determination to carry 
out the scheme, the three malcontents must have yielded. 

It is needless to say that the tides of feeling ran high, and 
gossip, not to say slander, was busy with her tongue. 

Bowhay, the Chapter Clerk, who had always been a protege 
of Mr. Marshall, and in whose hands the finances of the Chapter 
had been almost entirely reposed, was known to some of us as a 



142 Recollections and Reflections 

man, not only of small business capacity, but of dubious char- 
acter. The Vestry paid through him the rent of a cottage, but 
the checks did not return to the Treasurer for some months and 
we naturally concluded that they were used by Mr. Bowhay in a 
manner which could not be called straightforward ; and amongst 
us I have no doubt, some strong language was used, saying that 
he was an embezzler — which, indeed was an accurate term to 
describe him, as the future disclosed. And then we suddenly 
found circulated throughout the Diocese a large number of the 
Bishop's Eeport to the Board of Missions of 1886— a report 
which was not made public at the time, but which had remained 
in its original wrapping for sixteen years. Probably when the 
Bishop saw what he had written, in type, he hesitated to make 
it public at the time, something of the heat with which he had 
written it having cooled off. One day the Rev. J. W. Gunn 
went into the Bishop's study to find a number of these old re- 
ports wrapped up ready for direction, which he addressed at 
the Bishop's dictation. We were soon amply supplied with 
them ; they contained the unfortunate paragraph that I had gone 
East and begged $1,478 for Jarvis Hall, — "I regret not to be 
able to report the use made of this fund * * * as it has not 
been turned over to the Bishop nor the Board of Trustees of 
the School." 

This, of course, was a serious reflection on my probity, and 
it was evident that the pamphlet had been disseminated to show 
that if the Vestry held Mr. Bowhay to be an "embezzler," that 
I, who was presumed to be their instigator, was also of that ilk. 

The Secretary of the Vestry was instructed to ask the 
Bishop if he really intended in this paragraph to cast a slur on 
my character? Their very respectful communication he after- 
wards referred to thus : "Compliance with such a demand was 
clearly impossible. The making was considered to be an indig- 
nity and an impertinence, and entirely without law or right, 
propriety or precedent. * * * Any Rector, or Vestry, 



The Wolfe Hall Episode 143 

making such demand deserve, in my opinion, to be rebuked at 
least by silence." 

Commenting on this, five of his brother Bishops, whom he 
induced to sit as my judges, under the provisions of Canon 
XIX, of the Digest, appointing a Council of Conciliation, re- 
marked: "That the Vestry were entitled to make the request 
for a definite statement from the Bishop, couched in the respect- 
ful terms of the aforesaid communication of June 6, 1898." 

He wrote this report only five months after he had been 
present in Mr. Kountze's office, when he acquiesced in my hand- 
ing the money to Mr. Kountze, who generously donated $500, 
and I there and then wrote a check for $22 and thus the note for 
$2,000, which Mr. Kountze had lent me to make Jarvis Hall 
habitable, was liquidated. 

The Vestry, however, being only common folk, were unable 
to appreciate the Bishop's position, and refusing to permit any 
stigma to remain on their Rector, determinately held the Bishop 
accountable. The upshot of it all was that to relieve a situation 
which was becoming a scandal, the Bishops gathered in the Gen- 
eral Convention at Washington agreed to institute a Council of 
Conciliation, as Canon XIX directs, that differences between a 
Parish and a Bishop shall be adjusted by a court comprised of 
five neighboring Bishops. The Council sat at St. Louis. The 
Vestry sent Judge Wool worth, the Chancellor of Nebraska, and 
the Senior Churchwarden, Mr. Rathvon, to state their case, but 
the Bishops determined only to receive written evidence. Both 
sides fortified their position by numerous affidavits, but inas- 
much as not a single fact could be cited to the detriment of the 
Dean, and as the evidence of the Bishop's action in sending out 
the objectionable report was incontravertable, the Council could 
only tell him to recall the pamphlet, and they spared the 
Bishop the humiliation of apologizing for its imputation. Nor 
did the Vestry seek to do more than to induce the Bishop to 
resume his pastoral connection with the Cathedral. They ac- 



144 Recollections and Reflections 

cepted the findings of the Council without demur, paid Judge 
Woolworth's bill of $1,600, and thus amicable relations were 
again established which fortunately were maintained until the 
Bishop's death four years later. 

But I cannot help thinking that a stranger who had sacri- 
ficed so much, and worked so hard for the Church in Colorado 
deserved better treatment at the hands of the Missionary Board 
in New York ; for they issue an annual volume of all the reports 
of Missionary Bishops bound together, and in their volume for 
1886 they left out entirely the objectionable paragraph from 
Bishop Spalding's report. In doing this they were certainly 
derelict in their duty, for either I was misappropriating Church 
funds, or else the Bishop was not dealing fairly with the chief 
Clergyman in his Diocese. The gentlemanly, not to say Chris- 
tian, thing for the Board to have done, would have been to 
have sent out one of their number who could have heard both 
sides of the question and readily composed the differences. 

The effect of the Council of Conciliation was what the 
Canon purposed — conciliatory. We of the Cathedral were, of 
course, in no humor in any sense to demand the "pound of 
flesh" and gladly enough we dropped the whole proceeding into 
the Lethe; but I am afraid it so left its mark upon the Bishop 
that his health began to decline, from hardening of the arteries, 
and he asked for a Coadjutor, which a Special Council was called 
to elect in 1903. 

Knowing the Bishop's disinclination to accept me as his 
Coadjutor, and knowing that those of the clergy who were 
tinctured with what is curiously and fictitiously called "Catholi- 
cism" would do their best to elect a Bishop of their own 
way of thinking, I, of course, declined to be nominated and 
willingly supported the nominee of Mr. Oakes, Dr. Freeman, of 
Yonkers, an admirable man, who has since been elected to two 
Bishoprics, which he declined. He had had large financial ex- 
perience as the Auditor of a great railway system. If either of us 



: J 








THE FIRST DESIGN SUBMITTED. 




THE ACCEPTED DESIGN OF WHICH THE NAVE IS BUILT. 
ST. JOHN'S CATHEDRAL, DENVER 



The Wolfe Hall Episode 145 

had been elected we would have made short shrift of Mr. Bowhay 
and forestalled his plundering of the Diocese. The High Church 
Party led by Mr. Parker, who was then the Lay-Pope of Trinity 
of which Mr. Grimes was the Rector, and Mr. Marshall, centered 
on Mr. Grimes. It soon became evident that neither Dr. Free- 
man nor Mr. Grimes could be elected. 

Among the twenty names that were proposed the Rev. C. S. 
Olmstead received one vote. We had then with us a Mr. Hick- 
man, who was indeed a walking encyclopedia of ecclesiastical 
knowledge. I asked if anyone could tell us about this Mr. Olm- 
stead? Mr. Hickman readily supplied the main details of his 
clerical career, and someone sitting near me whispered to me, 
"and besides all that he's a Christian;" which most important 
of all facts I communicated to the Council, and so Mr. Olmstead 
received the necessary number of votes. 

The Consecration took place on May 1, 1903, SS. Philip and 
James' Day and was one of the most impressive of func- 
tions. Seven Bishops laid their Episcopal hands on his head and 
if ever Grace could be conveyed through official channels surely 
Bishop Olmsted must have been endued with all that was requi- 
site for "The Office of a Bishop," but inasmuch as he had 
finally to relinquish his Diocese because of his incompetency to 
manage the most ordinary financial processes, we may take his 
case as an experimentum crucis that Grace is not conferred by 
Apostolic Succession; that the only Grace connected with a 
clerical career is "the Grace of Opportunity," in which the man 
may or may not succeed according to the use or abuse he makes 
of the talents committed to his charge. 

But his oblivion to financial matters was fatal. It gave the 
Chapter Clerk all the opportunity he wanted for helping himself 
to Diocesan funds by raising mortgages on Diocesan property 
and gambling with the money — as he afterwards confessed — 
and unfortunately he readily hoodwinked the Bishop. 

Of course all this could not proceed without some of us 



146 Recollections and Reflections 

suspecting the wrong, and again and again attempts were made 
in the Annual Council to unearth Mr. Bowhay's transactions and 
bring them to the daylight. A financial committee was ap- 
pointed with Mr. Parker as the chairman, and Mr. Parker was 
the auditor of a great railroad system and an expert in accounts. 
This committee, of course, reported to the Council that the books 
of the Chapter Clerk should be audited by an independent ac- 
countant, but the dolce far niente of the Bishop allowed the 
resolution to remain inoperative. At one council Mr. Cobb act- 
ually printed a method of opening a new set of books for the 
Chapter accounts, which, if it had been adopted, would have ex- 
posed Mr. Bowhay in half an hour, but the astute clerk had al- 
ways kept himself under the patronage of Mr. Marshall, and Mr 
Marshall commanded the "Catholic" vote, so Mr. Cobb's resolu- 
tion was voted to be "laid on the table." The Bishop did on one 
occasion require Mr. Bowhay to make a viva voce statement of 
the condition of the various trusts, which, of course, many of us 
suspected was anything but the truth, but without an accountant's 
examination of the books we had nothing to substantiate our 
suspicions. Finding therefore that the Council was docile in the 
hands of the pilferer we appealed to a bank, who held the notes 
of the Chapter for many thousands of dollars, to demand that an 
accountant should exhibit to the bank what actual security they 
had for their loans, whereupon Mr. Bowhay finally arriving at 
an impasse, and realizing the truth of the Scripture, "Be sure 
thy sin will find thee out," attempted to cover some of his 
dubious tracks by burning the books. Fortunately, he was 
unable to complete the process, and what was left of the Records 
of the Chapter was placed in the hands of a firm of acountants 
who were months in disentangling the skein, at a cost to us of 
more than $5,00*0. It then appeared that $95,000 had disap- 
peared, and Mr. Bowhay wrote a confession that he had lost it 
in Wall Street, and in Colorado mining stocks, 



CHAPTER XXI. 

Of Things Musical. 

I hold that music should be an essential part of a minis- 
ter's education. To play a hymn tune is within the reach of 
people who do not know one note from another; it is a purely 
mechanical acquisition. I once had an organist who really was 
not musically equipped. His father was a village organist and 
caused his son, nolens volens, to follow his profession. The 
son by dint of dogged perseverance, not only acquired the art of 
reading music at sight, but having a good memory, he could play 
any quantity of hymns and chants by rote. 

He was practicing one day, with his coat off, as he generally 
did; I sat by him in my stall, for it is wisdom for the chief 
minister to be within speaking distance of his organist, and he 
said, "I wonder, Sir, how much of the Messiah I can play from 
memory." He handed me a Messiah and I followed him; he 
began at the overture, and played through the whole work in 
nearly two hours; and he hardly played an incorrect note. He 
even, after several attempts, succeeded in becoming a Fellow of 
the College of Organists. And yet he could not extemporize 
in a minor key, and was not really "musical." I cite his example 
of what persistent practice will accomplish. 

Every clergyman ought not only to be able to play hymns, 
but he should know something of the mechanism of an organ and 
how to tune an unruly pipe. It is surprising how much time 
and annoyance may be saved by even a little of such practical 
knowledge. 

And the keeping of a few rules in mind would improve 

147 



148 Recollections and Reflections 

many a crude and disjointed service. The tone of the service 
should be uniform; the hymns chosen to be in keeping with the 
sermon, which itself should be on the teaching of the day, either 
the subjects of the lessons or the Epistle and Gospel. The 
Service should ever be worship and not performance ; all musical 
display such as, an aspirant "rendering" her favorite song, which 
her mother and friends come to hear should be rigidly forbidden. 

Sound should never cease, from the opening voluntary to the 
choir "Amen" in the vestry. Silence causes a slight and un- 
comfortable shock and inadvertently sends the minds of the 
congregation a roaming. And a sympathetic choir, a choir which 
has any sentiment of worship, will naturally moderate the force 
to suit the sentiment to be expressed. The words, too, should be 
so enunciated as to be discerned by the people. An adherence 
to these few fundamental rules will enable any choir to render 
"an acceptable service." 

It is sometimes asserted that the musical faculty is a mental 
excrescence, and in some sort allied to insanity. It is true that 
musicians are abnormally jealous of each other, but since I have 
had an intimate view of the clerical and medical professions, 
I have found that musicians hold no monopoly on the vice of 
jealousy. 

Neither has my observation caused me to conclude that a 
genius for music always accompanies a very sensitive organ- 
ization. The most remarkable organist I have ever known is 
anything but sensitive, and strange to say he never practices; 
no doubt in his early days, and he took his Musical Doctor's 
degree at Oxford at a younger age than had ever been known, 
he did practice laboriously, but for the score of years I have 
known him, I question if he has practiced one whole hour; he 
seems to have established a subtle connection between his brain 
and his fingers, so that they perform the intimations of his will, 
con amore. 

It is so with his composing. There is a full Communion 



On Things Musical 149 

Service by Dr. Gower, in Hutchins' Chant and Service Book, 
which he composed upon the stencil of a mimeograph; he began 
at nine o'clock and at one he had printed fifty copies, and the 
next day which was Sunday, we sang that service, which is cer- 
tainly the best in the book. 

There is in the same book a "Short Kyrie" by "Winter; 
this musician was the most remarkable man I ever came across. 
I am justified in this large statement by the fact that when one 
of our most prominent citizens, on a visit to London, went to 
Scotland yard to investigate their detective system, as he was 
being shown a drawer full of divisions containing cards, and it 
was being explained that this was practically a card index of men 
who were "wanted" he was asked, if he did not say he came from 
Denver ? 

"This bundle of cards, refer to a man who was in Denver, 
who called himself Winter. He is the most astute criminal who 
ever came under our observation. At present he is in Paris; 
we can put our hand on him when we choose, but not wanting 
to go through the trouble of an extradition process, we are wait- 
ing until he should come over here." 

They well described him as "astute" for at that very time, 
he was engaged in the governmental secret service, under their 
nose. They did arrest him finally when he was stage manager 
of the Garrick Theatre by the name of Harry Montague. I may 
well therefore speak of him as the most notorious musician I 
have ever known. 

The most remarkable and distinguished musician I ever had 
the honor of knowing was Gounod. When the Germans invaded 
France and were evidently en route for Paris, many persons of 
eminence in things artistic escaped from the city. Among 
others Auguste Gern, one of the foremen in Cavaille-Coll's organ 
factory, who built for me a charming organ, and Gounod, who 
came to reside at Blackheath. He was composing "The Redemp- 
tion" which he intended to be his chef d'oeuvre ; he played to me 



150 Recollections and Reflections 

the overture, describing what he intended its various parts to 
illustrate. When he finished I ventured to say how anxious the 
musical world would be for its publication. "Ah! never/' he 
said, "it is my own spiritual note-book ; I could never give it to 
the public." 

He was one day looking over a children's Service Book I had 
published, and on reading the hymn, "There Is a Green Hill 
Far Away," he asked who was the author? And on my telling 
him Mrs. Alexander was known to me, he wondered if I would 
get him her permission to set it to music. I suggested he should 
write himself, which he did, and that was the origin of his 
celebrated song. 



CHAPTER XXII. 

Some Odds and Ends. 

In 1877 Mr. Winter was installed as our organist and 
choir-master in Blackheath. He was artistic, energetic, a fine 
bass and a very capable conductor. At once the service responded 
to the hand of a master. He represented that he had so many 
interests in London, that he could only give us from Friday to 
Monday. He had fascinated, as he was adept at doing, a young 
couple who for the interest of his visit were glad to have him 
for their weekly guest. He inaugurated a choral society. They 
produced "Pinafore" and gave concerts and musical evenings. 
Indeed, he was a very center of energy. 

The astonishing thing is, that for two years he escaped every 
suspicion. Now that I look back at the partial view I have of 
his career, I think the tricks he played, the false positions he as- 
sumed, the thefts he committed, he perpetrated for the very zest 
of doing them so cleverly as not to be found out. 

To aid and abet him in his transformations he had the power 
of changing the look of his face. He could assume the appear- 
ance of grave sickness without the opportunity of "making up." 
I am told some actors have the power of altering their faces in 
keeping with the part they are playing, but as I have never seen 
a play in a theatre, I must leave others to verify this. 

When Winter was finally caught and sent to prison for 
perjury, Mr. Pembroke, my churchwarden, the well-known ship- 
owner, in whose house he had lived, and with whom he was inti- 
mate as with his own sons, was subpoenaed to identify him. But 
when Winter stood in the dock, at Bow Street and Mr. Pem- 

151 



152 Recollections and Reflections 

broke was asked if he recognized the prisoner as Winter, he was 
unable to do so, and said, "If you will make him speak I will 
tell you," but Winter would not speak and remained incognito. 

The day after the Princess Alice, a Thames steamer full 
of Sunday School children went down, Winter appeared in my 
study. He looked blanched, his face was drawn, and his left arm 
in an ample sling. "Why, Mr. Winter, what is the matter with 
you ?" "I was in the Princess Alice, yesterday," he replied, "she 
smashed like a match-box." "And what did you do?" "I 
jumped overboard and hit my right arm against a floating spar." 
It afterwards transpired that he was ten miles away at the time^ 
teaching in a ladies' school. 

I have sometimes wondered if he was not afflicted with hys- 
teria; a singular disease which drives its victim to do the most 
risky things to elicit that sympathy for which the hysteric 
craves more desperately than does the toper for his dram. 

But there was sometimes "a method in his madness." One 
Sunday I noticed that at the last verse of the hymn before the 
sermon, the notes of the organ were thin and few. I could see the 
organ console in the South Transept from the pulpit, and as I 
turned to give the ascription, I saw Winter fall over on to the 
organ stool in a fit. Being a suburb of London many well- 
known physicians worshipped with us. No less a person than 
the President of the College of Physicians went to the sick man's 
side. He lay without making any noise through the sermon 
and as I turned at the close and the congregation rose, I saw 
his surpliced arm tremblingly stretch out and touch the note 
for the choir Amen. 

After service the great doctor came into the vestry, "Mr. 
Hart, your organist has had an epileptic fit, he appears to be 
over-worked, he ought to have a rest." I turned round to the 
churchwarden, who was counting the offertory, "Pembroke," I 
said, "have you no ship sailing this week?" He thought for a 
moment, "Why yes, the Mary Ann sails for Odessa on Tuesday." 



Some Odds and Ends 153 

"Will you get the captain to take Winter with him ?" And so 
he did. 

What had happened was, that Winter's many creditors had 
closed in upon him and he was on the verge of arrest; he had 
carefully studied the symptoms of epilepsy and so cleverly simu-. 
lated them that he had deceived so capable a man as the eminent 
physician. He disappeared from London for six weeks, and 
before he returned the anger of his creditors had cooled down 
and they had given up the search. 

He was a proficient French scholar, and induced two young 
men to take a trip on their bicycles through Holland. Winter 
kept the common purse. 

So pleasant and successful was their holiday, that next year 
the two young fellows with another friend re-traversed the route. 
Then they found that their individual bills were just a third 
less than before. Winter had added a third to each account and 
so franking himself, doubtless justifying his graft by considering 
his services as a courier were worth the money. 

A month or two before I came to Denver, Winter called 
upon me looking downcast and dejected; he said he had re- 
ceived a great blow; that his brother on his death-bed had con- 
fessed that he was the father of Mrs. Winter's two children. 
Winter said that all he could do under the circumstances was 
to divorce his wife, and, he added, "you will conclude that what I 
say is true from the fact that the suit will not be contested." 

It afterwards transpired that the only brother he ever had 
died when he was six years old. By a series of clever ma- 
noeuvres, he did actually get a decree nisi in Lord Hannen's 
court, and his wife was for six years unaware of the fact that she 
had been divorced. 

Thirteen years afterwards, for his many perjuries, he re- 
ceived in the Central Criminal Court, a sentence of six years' 
penal servitude. The Counsel for the prosecution said, "that 
seldom had a grosser deception been practiced on a Court of 



154 Recollections and Reflections 

justice/' While he was carrying out his design he looked about 
him for another partner of his fortunes. He became acquainted 
with a retired London merchant at Bromley, a widower with two 
daughters. The elder Miss Wright was a capital pianist, and one 
evening, as pianists sometimes do, she took off her rings and 
bracelets as she played. She had a handsome solitaire diamond 
set in black enamel ; that ring Winter put in his pocket. At the 
close of the evening, he even took the piano to pieces, in a vain 
effort to find it. Next morning he showed the ring to his hostess 
at Blackheath, saying that Miss Wright, who had worn it as a 
mourning ring for her mother, wished it now set in plain gold. 

It happened that year that I revisited Blackheath, and 
passing through the village, the jeweler accosted me, and asked 
me if I knew where Mr. Winter was ? "Yes, he is in Denver," 
I replied ; "Does he owe you anything ?" "Yes, Sir, he has with 
us a small account," and turning into his shop he showed me his 
ledger, and pointing to seven shillings and sixpence on the 
credit side, he volunteered the information that he brought a 
diamond ring to be re-set in plain gold; and they credited him 
with seven shilling and sixpence for the black enamel setting. 

Winter utilized the newly made ring as the bond of his 
engagement to the younger Miss Wright; but before further 
mischief accrued some of his character was divulged, and he was 
forbidden the house. 

If the plaintiff's suit is successful in an English divorce 
court, the judge pronounces the decree "nisi," that is, "unless" 
the King's proctor intervenes, then at the expiration of six 
months the decree becomes "absolute." It was within this six 
months that Winter secured a singing engagement at the Welsh 
seaport of Llandudno. Here he became acquainted with a dis- 
tinguished looking lady, the widow of a Liverpool merchant- 
with two handsome children and some independent means. 

With the vigor and astuteness of most of his proceedings he 
hurried her off to Bangor Cathedral and married her. But the 



Some Odds and Ends 155 

English law does not look with favor upon bigamists, and find- 
ing certain investigations were being instituted, having obtained 
his decree "absolute" he remarried Mrs. Winter in London; but 
this did not condone his previous oifense, and finding the of- 
ficers of the law upon his track, he crossed the Atlantic to New 
York at that very moment I was most in need of him. 

In my experience I have only known two organists who 
were geniuses. I define a genius to be a person who is capable of 
transferring his sentiments through his work. It is an unex- 
plainable fact that two organists may play the same composition 
even with the same arrangement of stops, the one will move you 
and "make trickles go down your back," the other awakens no 
thrilling sensation; the one is a genius, the other possesses only 
the gift of perseverance. 

Arthur W. Marchant, whom I brought with me, was a 
genius. His anthems, especially his Magnificat, are widely sung. 
He was a Mus. Bac. Oxon. of which degree he was very naturally 
proud, and occasionally, to emphasize his authority in musical 
matters, he paraded his distinction. 

But what did the "wild and woolly West" in those days 
care for a degree ? The paper said, to his great angerment, "He 
must B an Oxon." Magnificent organist though he was, he 
was helpless as a choir-master. In my necessity I thought of 
Winter, and wrote to him to ask him to come over and help us. 
My letter found him in New York, which he professed to believe 
was a special mark of God ? s leading, for he said he had been 
induced to write a medical work for a doctor whom he had dis- 
covered to be a quack, and had therefore thrown up his contract, 
and was wondering what he should do when my letter called him 
to Denver. 

When he arrived, as usual, he took everybody by storm, and 
agreed to return to England, wind up his affairs and come back 
to reside. The son of Mr. Killick, the Rector of St. Clement, 
Danes, in the Strand, had lately died of typhoid fever. His 



156 Recollections and Reflections 

two little children, we had taken into the Deanery until some 
means should oiler of sending them, with an escort, to England, 
to their grandparents. Winter, at once proposed to take them. 
The ladies were all enchanted; passes, for those were the palmy 
days of liberal railroad travel, and every conceivable thing was 
provided for the journey. 

It afterwards transpired that he sold everything that was 
at all superfluous, even to their trinkets of jewelry at Chicago. 
But he delivered the two little ones safely to their grandmother, 
who was waiting for them at Liverpool, and then cabled to the 
railroad magnate, who supplied the passes, for a loan of fifty 
pounds. 

In due time he arrived with his wife and her two beautiful 
children and at once placed the choir on a basis it has ever since 
proceeded upon with marked success. I instructed him to find 
in England an organist to his liking, which he did, borrowing 
of him two hundred pounds, which of course, he never returned. 

The first Sunday the choir appeared in the vestry, Winter 
was adorned with a magnificent hood. I said, "What have you 
got on ?" "Oh !" he replied, "This is the hood of the Licentiates 
of Trinity College, London. I was a Choral Fellow and when 
we amalgamated with Trinity College, they took us in as Li- 
centiates." 

After service I enquired more about the hood. He then 
said that if I preferred it he would wear a Cambridge hood. I 
said, "I never knew you were a Cambridge man." "Whv, all 
your masters knew it," he said. "What college were you at?" 
"Trinity," he replied. "When did you take your degree ?" "In 
1874, he asserted. By that mail I wrote two letters, one to a 
pupil of mine in Cambridge, asking him to find out if A. L. 
Winter did take his degree in 1874, and what kind of a man he 
was. The other letter was to Dr. Bonavia Hunt, who was War- 
den of Trinity College, London, and indeed its creator, asking 
him if the Choral Fellows were received by them as Licentiates ? 



Some Odds and Ends 157 

Mr. Marchant had preserved bound volumes of the Musical 
Times, in one of which was a printed list of the Licentiates of 
Trinity College. 

"Winter's name was not among them. After showing me 
this he left the book on the music shelf at the organ. A few 
days afterwards he found that the page had been carefully torn 
out. Of course I knew Winter had done it, and so I told him, 
when he instantly replied, "I can give you fourteen reasons why 
I shouldn't tear it out." "And by that very token," I said, 
"it is clear that you did." 

By the next mail I received answers to my inquiries. There 
was a Winter who had graduated from Trinity College, Cam- 
bridge, in 1874, but he was a tall man with light hair and a 
noted cricketer, whereas "the Winter of our discontent" was 
a short man with dark hair, not given to cricket. 

Dr. Hunt replied that the Choral Fellows were taken in 
as Associates and not as the higher grade of Licentiates; there- 
fore Winter had no right to wear the hood. When I confronted 
him with these facts he shrugged his shoulders and said, "N'im- 
porte, what shall I do ?" I said, "You may wear the hood of the 
Choral Fellows, black serge with purple lining." 

Next Sunday when he appeared with the choir, I didn't 
know him; he had close cropped his hair and turned up his 
mustache, a la Kaiser; this so altered his appearance, that all 
the eyes were turned on his head and no one noticed the change 
on his back. It is unnecessary to say that it was impossible 
to retain his services, and in the course of some months we let 
him depart, not before, however, his wife presented him with a 
daughter, on the night of Madam Christine Nilsson's concert, 
whom he induced to be the godmother, and honored me with 
being the godfather. 

After he left here he went to live in Paris, where Mrs. 
Winter died and he administered the estate. Directly, or in- 



158 Recollections and Reflections 

directly, he must have been the cause of her death. Her two 
children disappeared, probably relegated to a French orphanage. 

Now, here was a man who had lived for years in "the odor 
of anctity," "a regular communicant," according to the Churchly 
description. To all outward appearance he was a most reputa- 
ble member of society, and yet, he was a bundle of deception, 
and his chief delight was in contriving circumstances either to 
gratify his vanity or enhance his notoriety. 

He left his mark in a widely used music book, Hutchins' 
Chant and Service Booh, and whenever we sing that Lesser 
Kyrie, No. 369, I ever put in a prayer for his soul, that the 
Lord will have mercy upon him, for it seems to me that he was 
possessed of a very demon. 

It is a never ending source of wonder how easily the public 
is gulled. About some twenty years ago there came to Denver 
a man who called himself Hadyn Tilla. He announced that in 
traveling in Italy he had stayed at a monastery. One of the 
monks had kindly bestowed upon him a parchment of ancient 
date which he discovered in the Archives. This parchment re- 
vealed a valuable secret, which if possessed by any singer would 
enable him or her to produce the tone of any artist of that class 
which they selected. 

Mr. Tilla advertised for pupils, undertaking for two hun- 
dred dollars to impart to them sufficient instruction to 
enable them to utilize the secret. He actually secured 
several aspirants. He advertised a concert at which his pupils 
were to display their marvellous powers. He secured the Baptist 
church. His wife, with less clothes on than the good Baptists 
could conscientiously countenance, played the accompaniments. 
He had provided a bouquet for each performer and vociferously 
applauded their wretched singing. The great secret which he im- 
parted to them the night before was that they were to keep their 
mouths shut, and sing against their teeth! 



Some Odds and Ends 159 

Will it be believed, that in ten years he returned again, 
and again succeeded in cajoling many others to believe his pre- 
posterous story? 

Some years ago Lord Herschell appeared here en voyage 
with his new wife. I had known something of him before he 
had arrived at the Woolsack, so he spent a day with me and I 
had the pleasure of taking him around to some of my legal 
friends and introducing them to the first Lord Chancellor who 
had ever visited our city, and had sat on the seat which Eldon 
and the great luminaries of the law had warmed. 

Walking up Sixteenth Street we met a man whom his keen 
eye recognized. He seized my arm, and said, "Is it possible he's 
here ? He was once a client of mine and I then said if he man- 
aged other people's business as he did his own, he must come to 
smash." He and his brother succeeded their father, who was 
a greatly trusted family solicitor. It was the habit in England 
for country gentlemen to leave the deeds of their estates, and 
other securities in the keeping of their lawyer. When the father 
died and the brothers came into possession of the business they 
"raised the wind" by using the securities of their clients, and 
when the end came their liabilities reached ten million dollars. 
Their delinquencies shook the London legal world to the foun- 
dations of their strong rooms. The man Lord Herschell saw 
was then keeping a servants' registry office in Denver. He had 
had a splendid house near Windsor, and Digby Johnson, another 
renegade lawyer to whom I shall presently refer at more length, 
and who being a prominent London solicitor was familiar with 
Lord Mayors' banquets and Livery dinners, told me that of all 
the banquets he had ever attended, a dinner given at this lawyer's 
house at Windsor beat them all. I used to visit his wife, an 
English lady, who, good woman that she was, had faithfully 
accompanied her husband in his degradation, but alas ! like so 
many English people when thrown into impecunious circum- 
stances, she had found herself utterly unable to do those elements 



160 Recollections and Reflections 

of housekeeping which servants had always performed for her, 
and in her one room she gradually deteriorated into dirt, hope- 
lessness and misery. 

It is very curious how true it is that an Englishman is like 
a cat with one trick. He is generally absolutely au fait with 
doing that to which he had been brought up, but he is a fish 
out of water if forced into any other occupation, and in nothing 
does he differ more from his American cousin than in his want 
of resource. 

An English gentleman came out here to shoot an elk in our 
mountains. He engaged a hunter of my acquaintance to guide 
him into the forest. While the hunter was "fixing" the camp the 
Englishman took his gun, strolled out and lost his way. As the 
short twilight was ending, the guide was unable to track him 
and receiving no answer to his continual shouting, and firing of 
his rifle, there was nothing to do but wait for the morning light. 
During the night there was a slight fall of snow but the hunter 
was a first rate woodsman, and by the slight indentation where 
the snow covered his footsteps he traced him about a mile away, 
where he found him walking backwards and forwards under a 
tree. "It was a beastly night," was about all the remark he 
made. "But why didn't you light a fire?" asked the hunter, 
and the Englishman characteristically replied, "I didn't know 
how." 

"When they returned to Denver and he came to settle up, 
having paid the agreed upon sum he "passed across" an extra 
check with the laconic remark, "It was a beastly night." 

Some twenty-five years ago a gentleman calling himself 
Digby Johnson made himself known to us. He had no disposi- 
tion to hide his light under a bushel so we soon learned he had 
had a distinguished legal career in England which he had been 
compelled by epilepsy to forego. In the search for the equi- 
librium of his nerves he had taken a long sea voyage to Australia, 




THE INTERIOR OF THE CATHEDRAL FROM THE CHANCEL. 

THE LENGTH FROM THE CHANCEL STEPS TO THE 

DOOR IS 135 FEET— THERE ARE 90 PEWS- 



Some Odds and Ends 161 

where he had risen into significance by his public advocacy of 
the orthodox faith against the Robert Ingersoll of the antipodes. 
Of his victorious performance he exhibited many newspaper 
clippings. He was a very effective public speaker and soon took a 
foremost hand in what is known as Church work. 

He intimated that as a barrister in England he had prac- 
ticed on the Northern Circuit and was replete with tales and 
incidents with which such an experience would naturally supply 
him; but as we afterwards discovered him to be a superlative 
liar I refrain from repeating any of his extraordinary anecdotes 
of men and things. You could hardly mention a politician of 
note from Mr. Gladstone to the Radical Member for Bradford, 
Mr. Miall. of whom he would not say "I know him very well, 
very well, indeed." He similarly asserted his intimacy with 
one or two of the London legal lights with whom I had occa- 
sional correspondence, and sometimes I would mention in my 
letters the presence here of their acquaintance, Mr. Digby John- 
son. On one occasion he casually remarked that he had filled 
the editorial chair of The Evening Standard. Happening to 
have one of the London editors on my list of friends I asked him 
to enquire of the Standard people if they had ever had an editor 
of that name, and he replied that no one connected with the 
paper could recollect him. So my suspicions grew. He became 
a candidate for Holy Orders and readily passed the examinations, 
and as "Western Bishops are always short of clergy, Bishop 
Spalding was willing to ordain him. But I was uneasy, and 
the evening before his Ordination I went to his lodgings to have 
a heart to heart talk with him. He swept aside my objections 
with readiness and ease and I presented him the next day for 
Ordination. After that most solemn of ceremonies he came to 
me in the vestry, and with tears running down his cheeks he 
said, 'TDean, it would have been impossible for you, knowing the 
great responsibility you kindly undertook in presenting me for 



162 Recollections and Reflections 

Holy Orders, not to have interviewed me as yon did last night 
if yon had the slightest suspicion of my rectitude." 

His clerical career here was a marked success. He built a 
small and attractive church and its rectory. I happened that 
year to revisit Blackheath, and one of the leading city solicitors 
was good enough to ask half a dozen barristers of note to meet 
me at dinner. I turned to my host, "Do you mean to say you 
don't know Digby Johnson ?" and mimicing his voice I said, "He 
knows you very well indeed, very well indeed," and half a dozen 
of the guests shouted out, "Learoyd !" and before I left for 
America one of them furnished me with some correspondence 
over that signature which at once established his identity. They 
gave him a character seldom equalled for unconscionable adroit- 
ness; he even became so hardened in duplicity that he wrote 
affidavits for his clients. In due time he was discovered and 
fled from arrest. His villainous career had driven his wife to an 
asylum; he nevertheless had married a clergyman's widow in 
Denver. Of course he was unfrocked. He went East, became 
a Universalist, an employee of Tammany, drifted back to San 
Francisco where he practiced law, was injured in the earthquake 
by a falling plank which brought on erysipelas — and so ended 
his tortuous career. 

Twenty-five years ago bands of antelope were to be seen 
anywhere on the plains and I went down to the ranch of a friend 
some sixty miles to the East to try to get one. One afternoon 
a neighbor of some fifteen miles appeared. He turned out to be 
an English gentleman who had once been Master of the Hounds 
in Lincolnshire. I naturally abstained from treading on tender 
ground as to why his condition had become so strikingly altered ; 
but he told me he was ranching and chiefly concerned in rais- 
ing pigs. I afterward learned that his ranch house was not 
remarkable for order and cleanliness, and that he lay in bed not 
a little reading novels. 



Some Odds and Ends 163 

The following Christmas, one afternoon, the Sexton met 
me telling me that a body had arrived and my daughter had 
directed that the little coffin should be taken to the Chapel, 
whither I at once went, and sure enough there was a plain coffin 
made in the English fashion, and on the lid was written "Re- 
quiescat in pace." On unscrewing the lid there was a suckling 
pig lying on its back with its front legs tied together, and I 
remembered the promise of my friend, the Master of the 
Hounds, and substituted his gift for the universal turkey on 
Christmas Day. 

A young Englishman appeared here, whom I shall call Mr. 
Ireland. He was a mauvais suject, but with considerable intel- 
ligence, and a rich mother in London. He had done some dab- 
bling in mines, more especially in mining stocks, and undertook 
to publish a mining journal, which he did with some success. 
He was a gentleman as far as his lineage was concerned. For 
some unaccountable reason he insisted on marrying an Irish 
widow with two children. Kate was a nice looking woman and 
worked hard over the wash-tub to maintain herself and her girls, 
but she was much his inferior in the social scale. After they 
were married it was impossible to say that their home was har- 
monious. I have even known Kate to spend the night on the 
vacant lot adjoining the cottage — I might say catapulted out of 
the house. There could be but one end to such disagreement, 
and Ireland turned his back upon the fight and departed; and 
as many another has done, she depended on me largely for 
support. Knowing the address and circumstances of his opulent 
mother, I suggested that Kate should go to Court and obtain 
an order for alimony against her faithless spouse. I was sur- 
prised how pretty she looked in Court; trimly dressed, a neat 
bonnet and spotted veil, she really looked quite attractive. The 
prosecuting attorney said, "Now, Mrs. Ireland, you say your 
husband deserted you last April, it is now November, who has 



164 Recollections and Reflections 

kept you all these months?" Instead of answering simply and 
naturally as she ought to have done, she turned to the Judge; 
"Must I answer that question, your Honor ?" The Court rubbed 
his chin and looked out of the window, considering, and finally 
decided that she must; whereupon, with a slight hesitancy, she 
said, "Dean Hart," at which the Court burst into laughter, the 
Judge heartily joining. 

I have remarked before in these Reminiscences how singu- 
lar it is that a vein of interest seems to run through some lives — 
it was so in this case. We succeeded in getting something like 
a competency from London, and then Mrs. Ireland declined in 
health. Her figure became so enlarged that I asked one of our 
leading gynaecologists if he would try to discover what was the 
matter with her. He concluded that she had an ovarian tumor 
and recommended an operation as her only resort, which I had 
no little difficulty in persuading her to permit. I arranged for 
her to go to St. Luke's Hospital, and my friend kindly undertook 
to operate. When she was under the anaesthetic the surgeon 
went into the next room to get his sutures, which were steeping 
fin alcohol; by some mischance the alcohol took fire and the 
surgeon was so severely burned about the face that he was hur- 
ried off to be treated. When Kate came out of the ether and 
found that she had not been operated on she said it was proof 
positive that Almighty God did not intend her to be cut into 
and she then and there got out of bed and dressed at once to 
leave the hospital, apparently perfectly well, having resumed her 
normal size. The only plausible explanation of what she called 
a miracle appeared to be that the frequent assurance that the 
operation would safely remove the tumor and she would be per- 
fectly well had supplied that Suggestion which appears to have 
an almost omnipotent capability, and which, when she was under 
the ether and her will in abeyance, operated on the tumor and 
dispersed it. 

In about a year's time Ireland returned to the city, saying 



Some Odds and Ends 165 

that his brother had died and left him a large ranch forty miles 
from Milwaukee; that if Kate would make it up they would go 
and live on the ranch and remain happy for the rest of their 
days. She was glad enough to go, but the day after their arrival 
he drove off with the only horse and buggy that the ranch 
possessed, leaving her and the children miles from anywhere. 
He has never been heard of since. His wife finally made her 
way to St. Paul, where she left her two children in an orphan 
asylum, and I regret to say she herself took to a disreputable life. 



CHAPTER XXIII. 

Incidents Psychological. 

It is impossible that a profession which deals mainly with 
the concerns of the Spiritual world should be altogether unin- 
terested in matters and experiences which deal with the mys- 
terious and psychic. 

I was very thankful at the beginning of my life to have had 
an experience which convinced me that thought could be trans- 
ferred. For it is this capability which explains whatever may 
be striking and remarkable in the revelations of a medium. 

I was spending my long vacation at my home. There came 
to our town a conjurer, who called himself Banardo Eagle. He 
was a man of imposing presence. I well remember him, for their 
little child died during his stay, and I still see the sad procession 
going down the aisle of the solemn, cold Church. My father, 
attended by the Parish clerk, followed by the undertaker, carry- 
ing a small white coffin. The great conjurer, with his little 
weeping wife, bringing up the rear. 

A part of his entertainment was a clairvoyant, whom he 
mesmerized on the platform, and then she appeared to be able 
to repeat anything which he had on his mind. 

My uncle had a fishing box in one of the Yorkshire dales 
and I wrote to him, that at 9 o'clock next Tuesday night, he 
should be looking over his fly-book. When the hour arrived, I 
stood up in the audience and asked, what my uncle was at that 
time doing and where he was ? 

I was in the middle of the audience and the conjurer was 
standing near me. He put my question to the girl. She then 

166 



Incidents Psychological 167 

began to depict the scene as I saw it in my mind. A gentleman 
with a fresh face, gold spectacles, stand-up collar, blue neck-tie 
with white spots, sitting at a table with a red table-cloth with a 
white pattern, two silver fluted candle-sticks with wax candles. 
He was reading a book. "Tell us what the book is about," said 
her master. She hesitated. "Turn to the title page," he said. 
I inwardly laughed and said to myself, "There is no title page." 
And she taking the information out of my mind, said, "It is 
about fly-fishing." I then said, "Tell me where he is." Eagle, 
who was standing close to me, ten yards from the platform, said, 
"Will you tell me the name of the place, sir. I will stand here 
by you ?" I replied, "Let us see if she can tell us independently/'' 
and I must say, to my great astonishment, she uttered "Pateley 
Bridge." 

Here there could be no collusion, no one in the room, or 
in the town, knew where my uncle was. There could therefore 
be only one explanation, that the girl in the mesmeric state, was 
telepathically connected with my mind, and could read its 
prominent contents. 

I have never found the communications of a medium which 
were true which could not be accounted for by telepathy. Such 
as for instance : One day, an old gentleman, who said he was a 
retired merchant from Philadelphia, and was staying in Denver, 
had come in contact with a medium whose revelations from the 
spiritual world had greatly perturbed him. He had been mar- 
ried twice, and both his wives had communicated with him, and 
presumably with each other. This was what troubled him. I 
questioned him closely as to the revelation, and I very soon con- 
vinced him that the medium was merely relating what was pass- 
ing through his own mind; she had communicated not a single 
thing which was not known to him. He thanked me and went 
away quite relieved. 

Two narratives decided me that mediums were not in com- 
munication with the unseen world, through their "controls." 



168 Recollections and Reflections 

The first is the experience of a devoted Spiritualist, Colonel J. 
S. Dryden, of San Diego. Here is his own narratal: 

"In May, 1898, my son left home to enlist for the Philip- 
pine conflict, and the last we have seen or heard of him on the 
material plane was when he was separated from his brother at 
Bakersfield, Cal., now almost eight years ago. Since that time 
I have received thirty-six or thirty-seven different communica- 
tions from the spirit world concerning him, and the strangely 
contradictory, uncertain and unsatisfactory nature of all, and 
the absurd character of some of the messages have aroused within 
me strange speculations as to the nature of spirit messages, and 
even serious doubts as to the reliability of either the spirits 
giving or the mediums receiving the messages. 

"After exhausting the material sources of information, I 
turned with confidence to the spirit world, fully believing that 
if the boy had passed to that realm it would be known by some 
one and truthfully reported to me. 

"Among the first, if not the first, messages received, was 
one not purporting to come from himself, but from some one 
speaking for him, that he had perished in a snow-slide in the 
Klondike. A few days later in a public circle, at the close of a 
Sunday service in a Spiritualist hall, one announcing himself 
as my father, who has been in spirit life fifty-four years, declared 
that he had brought the boy there with him, who was as yet 
unable to speak for himself, and gave a partial account of his 
transition, but not the snow-slide method at all. This seemed 
so authentic and rational that I felt satisfied with it and made 
no further inquiries for a time, when, judge of my surprise, to 
have father, or some one pretending to be he, deny that he ever 
gave such a communication in public or otherwise, and declare 
positively that he knew nothing as to the boy's whereabout. 

"Then followed communications of all kinds and descrip- 
tions, from public platforms, at circles and private sittings, in 7 
perhaps two or three instances unexpected and uncalled for. 



Incidents Psychological 169 

"Two others placed him in the Klondike, one that he was 
digging gold and getting rich, and another that he was doing 
something else, and gave the name of the city where he could be 
reached. I wrote the postmaster there and no such person had 
ever been heard of there. 

"Two others told of his tragic ending at Bakersfield, one 
that he had been murdered in or near the city, and the other 
that he had been killed by the cars a few miles north of the city. 
I wrote the coroner, public administrator, etc., but no such oc- 
currences had taken place anywhere near the date alleged. 

"Two others saw him lying on the seashore dead, where he 
had been washed ashore from a wreck, one near Manila, and the 
other one somewhere along the coast, away up in Alaska, or 
somewhere north of here. 

"Another one claimed that he had deserted from the army 
and was somewhere in Africa. Another that he was in business 
in the Philippines and was making plenty of ' shiners/ Another 
one — or probably two others — that he was a sailor on merchant- 
men and on long voyages. Another, that he was mining in 
Arizona, but could give no post-office address, etc. Just about 
an equal number affirm positively that he is in the spirit life. 
In one instance, my own grandmother was represented as saying 
that she was with him when he passed out and cared for him in 
the new life. But my own father, mother, three brothers, five 
sisters, and three of my own children in spirit life, with all of 
whom — or someone representing them — I have communed, not 
one of them has seen him or knows of his whereabout. 

"This last is the most puzzling feature to me. It would 
seem that if the magnetic lines of kinship exist between the boy 
and myself, or any of the rest of us, he might be traced if yet 
in the form. In reference to many of the instances in which it 
was claimed that he was still in earth life, I h&Te thought that the 
fact that he was a twin, that his brother is still in the body, and 
all the time thinking and pining over his brother's absence, may 



170 Recollections and Reflections 

be a partial explanation of some of them. They may be getting 
the magnetism confused. Altogether, it is a strange experience, 
and filled me with unpleasant reflections, and at times almost 
shaken my confidence in the phenomenal side of Spiritualism. 

(It would take a San Francisco earthquake to 'shake' this 
Colonel.) 

"San Diego, Jan. 29, 1906. 

"P. S. — The latest dispatch' was yesterday, January 28 — 
that he had been murdered by a native in the Philippines and his 
body thrown into a river, and that a sum of money could be 
obtained by investigation. I called upon the medium this morn- 
ing, but not a hint could be obtained as to where to investigate, 
what he was doing, or anything about it." 

Ex uno disce omnes. 

For some years I was a member of the Psychic Society and 
interested myself in finding explanations for the many remark- 
able instances which came before the meetings, especially in 
cases which are known as Haunted Houses. 

One of the established conclusions of scientific investigation 
so rife in the last century is the Conservation of Energy. Now, 
if it be true, that no force occurs without producing a result, the 
same vibrations of light and sound which affect the eye and the 
ear, must also leave their mark upon the walls of the room and 
the articles it contains. 

This is more easily appreciated, if the modern theory of 
matter is correct. If ultimate atoms are little worlds of electrons 
in a high state of vibration, it is readily conceivable that the 
impingement of light and sound waves must, by altering the 
vibrations, register their effect. And why should it not be pos- 
sible, under the proper set of conditions, for these sights and 
sounds to be again reproduced, as is in the case of the phono- 
graph or the development of a photographic plate. 

To illustrate: I have never myself seen, what is called a 
ghost, but I have met many persons who, if their testimony 



Incidents Psychological 171 

could be credited, have had that privilege. A lady of my 
acquaintance said she was visiting in a house in Brighton. 
Passing along an upstairs passage one day, she saw a house- 
maid walking before her. She noticed how neatly she was dressed, 
in a white cotton dress with pink spots. The maid turned into a 
bedroom on the right of the passage and disappeared. She 
thought it was singular, that she did not hear the door open or 
close. 

She spoke of her experience, and they immediately said, 
"Oh, then you have seen the supernumary." The sight of that 
servant in that passage was so common an occurrence, that they 
styled her the "Supernumary," their extra servant. 

According to my theory, that house-maid had actually 
walked along that passage and for some reason, probably con- 
nected with some tragic event which happened in the bed-room 
into which she went, the vibrations of light by which she was 
made visible were indelibly impressed upon the surroundings; 
and when certain conditions were present, probably largely con- 
nected with the beholder, the sight was reproduced. 

Generally, ghosts are connected with the shedding of blood. 
The sight of blood, which, of course, means the rays of light 
reflected from the blood had imparted to them certain peculiari- 
ties. Some people faint when they see blood; I well remember 
as a medical student the violent sensations which used to come 
over me when I first was present at an operation. I was in- 
tensely interested and knew what I might expect to see. Why, 
then, in spite of myself, should I have the greatest difficulty in 
watching the operation ? I would beat my head against the wall 
to compel my eyes to remain steady and yet I would be obliged to 
leave the theatre. 

I read of a case in Algiers of a photographer securing a 
window close by a stage on which three prisoners were to be 
beheaded. The first picture was excellent, the second was foggy 



172 Recollections and Reflections 

and the third was invisible. I have never had time to experi- 
ment in this direction, but it is worth investigating. 

Any scientific man will believe anything, however miracu- 
lous, provided there is sufficient evidence to support it. All 
depends upon the quality and quantity of the evidence. 

A psychic experience which strongly corroborates my sup- 
position was related to me by a lady doctor long resident in 
Denver. 

At the commencement of her medical career she attended 
the Woman's Hospital in Philadelphia. She found lodgings 
with a Mrs. Smith, the widow of a clergyman, who lived in a 
style of house common in Philadelphia. A staircase ascends on 
one side of the hall, crosses under a staircase window and ascends 
to the second story on the other side. At the top of the first 
flight was a bedroom whose door was reached by two or three 
steps. A person sitting on these steps could not be seen from 
the hall door. This room was assigned to the young student. It 
was in the autumn and the weather was sultry and warm. She 
was naturally nervous at beginning her life's work in a strange 
city. The house appeared noisy at night so that she hardly slept 
at all. Next night noises disturbed her, she heard people walk- 
ing about. The next morning on coming down to breakfast she 
looked at her fellow lodgers and concluded that a sheepish-looking 
girl took some kind of drug and probably walked in her sleep. 
With the intention of catching the somnambulist, she sat in her 
dressing gown on the steps leading to her room. The moon shone 
through the staircase window so that anyone coming up the stairs 
would easily have been seen. About 12 o'clock she heard foot- 
steps coming up the stairs and fully expected to see the girl she 
was watching for, but the footsteps passed along the level land- 
ing, up the steps on the other side, and there was a sound as if 
someone was trying one of the bedroom doors, and being unable 
to open it, the person returned down the stairs and passing 






Incidents Psychological 173 

close to where she was sitting she heard the rustle of skirts by 
which she concluded that the unseen visitant was a woman. The 
hall door was then opened and closed, and there was silence for 
five minutes or more, then the hall door again opened and there 
was the sound of two people entering and ascending the stairs. 
Finding as before the door of the bedroom fastened there was a 
loud noise as of forcing the door open, and then by the shuffling 
of the feet it seemed they were carrying a heavy body into an- 
other room. 

This sequence of sounds was repeated several times through 
the night when finally with the dawn my informant went to bed. 

It afterwards transpired that Mrs. Smith had had a daugh- 
ter afflicted with melancholia. It was the year when the Great 
Exhibition was held in Philadelphia and all the household except 
the mother and daughter had gone to watch one of the proces- 
sions. The daughter retired early and about 10 o'clock Mrs. 
Smith went to her room to see if she was comfortable and asleep. 
Finding the door locked and receiving no answer to her knock- 
ings, she became frightened and went for the doctor, who lived 
in the next square. They both returned, forced open the door 
and found that the girl had cut her throat, and they carried her 
body into another room. 

Now these sounds had actually occurred, and being regis- 
tered in the surrounding walls, were emitted as from the disc of 
a phonograph upon the conjunction of a certain set of condi- 
tions in which the nervous temperament of the young student 
occupied a leading position. 

On three occasions I asked my friend, the doctor, to relate 
to me her experience, and as she did so without any alteration 
of the details I concluded that she was narrating facts and not 
imaginations. 

The Rev. Hugh Robinson was a Canon of York, a rifled 
cannon, as he used to describe himself, for when York was put 



174 Recollections and Reflections 

on the New Cathedral foundation the incomes of the Canons 
were greatly reduced ; he was afterwards one of the f our Public 
School Commissioners. It is evident that the Canon was a man 
of unusual attainments. He was of muscular build, and of a 
fearless nature. 

When the flour mill at Burley, a village in my father's 
parish of which he was Vicar, was on fire, he was seen coming 
from the mill with a sack of flour under each arm. When he 
told me of the following experience I received it from such a 
man as a matter of fact. 

His first Incumbency was Clun, in Staffordshire. He ar- 
rived with his bride one Saturday night. Most of the furniture 
was not yet unpacked, and the house more or less in disorder. 
As they were sitting in the drawing room after supper some one 
was heard walking along the corridor upstairs. 

Of course, he went up to see who was the intruder. Finding 
no one, he came down again; and was again aroused by foot- 
steps along the passage and a knock at the door. On bidding 
them enter no one responded. Before they retired the two servant 
girls came to ask if they might sleep in the village, for they, too, 
had heard uncanny knockings and every now and then the latch 
would rise and fall. 

That night, just as the church clock struck two, they were 
both awakened by a sound in the drawing room below, as if 
eome heavy metal had fallen upon the floor. Mr. Robinson, 
thinking that burglars had forced in the iron fastenings of the 
window shutters, went down to deal with the intruders, but he 
found everything undisturbed. These unaccountable noises were 
frequently to be heard. 

One day Mrs. Robinson's sister came to pay them a visit. 
They agreed that they would not warn her of the disturbances, 
sounded as if the chandelier in the drawing room had fallen. 
On coming down to breakfast the next morning, which was Sun- 
day, she said, "Hugh, what was the sound which woke me? It 



Incidents Psychological 175 

And why did you not come in when you knocked at my door 
and I told you to ?" 

A few mornings afterwards she asked why the Sexton should 
be digging a grave under her window all night. The Church 
yard lay between the Vicarage and the Church. "I heard him 
throwing the earth as the grave got deeper against the wall, and 
some of the pebbles fell back again/' Of course, they said it was 
her imagination, but she insisted on going to look. 

Now, according to my theory, all these noises had at some- 
time actually happened, and left their impress in the surrounding 
material; and every now and then a set of conditions occurred 
which caused them to be reproduced. 

However, I am bound to relate a circumstance for which it 
would be difficult to find a place in my theory. The Vicar had a 
couple of Scotch terriers. If the noise had been occasioned by 
rats, or if even tricks had been played upon them by some of the 
villagers, nothing would have suited the terriers better than to 
have ferreted out the cause. Instead of which, whenever these 
noises occurred, the dogs lay in abject fear with water running 
from them, terrorized almost to death. 

Another curious circumstance connected with the case was 
that the previous Vioar, a bad man, was unmolested. When 
Canon Robinson told me of this story, which was forty years 
ago, he said he believed they had had to pull down the house and 
build another. 

Of course, there are some people who would account for 
these disturbances by supposing they were the work of a Spirit of 
Evil, and I do not think that this explanation is so improbable, 
as to be summarily dismissed. When we consider the smallness 
of this planet and the fewness and the transitoriness of its in- 
habitants, and that we must be in the midst of a spirit Universe 
populated by untold millions of personalities, the wonder is, not 



176 Recollections and Reflections 

that we are subject to spiritual interference, but that we so sel- 
dom have reason to suspect it. 

People who are inclined to explain the Demonology of the 
New Testament by insanity, epilepsy and other nerval disorders, 
cannot be familiar with the history of savages or of the Oriental 
peoples, notably China — a country which is given over to Demon- 
ology and where Demon-possession is common. Instances of 
exorcising the Demons are to be found in the memoirs of any 
Missionary who has lived any length of time in China. Perti- 
nent examples will be found in "Pastor Hsi," a well-known 
missionary book from which I quote. The Chinese called the 
Pastor "Conqueror of Demons," and as if in jeering retribution, 
the Adversary seized his wife: 

"Suddenly, all was changed; and her very nature seemed 
changed, too. At first only moody and restless, she rapidly fell 
a prey to deep depression, alternating with painful excitement. 
Soon she could scarcely eat or sleep, and household duties were 
neglected. In spite of herself, and against her own will, she 
was tormented by constant suggestions of evil, while a horror as 
of some dread nightmare seemed to possess her. She was not ill 
in body, and certainly not deranged in mind. But try as she 
might to control her thoughts and actions, she seemed under the 
sway of some evil power against which resistance was of no avail. 
Especially when the time came for daily worship, she was 
thrown into paroxysms of ungovernable rage. This distressed 
and amazed her as much as her husband, and at first she sought 
to restrain the violent antipathy she did not wish to feel. But 
little by little her will ceased to exert any power. She seemed 
carried quite out of herself, and in the seizures, which became 
frequent, would use language more terrible than anything she 
could ever have heard in her life. Sometimes she would rush 
into the room, like one insane, and violently break up the pro- 
ceedings, or would fall insensible on the floor, writhing in con- 
vulsions that resembled epilepsy. 




THE INTERIOR OF THE CATHEDRAL. 

FOUR OF THE EIGHT ARCHES VISIBLE. 

THE CY ANCEL IS 50 FEET DEEP. 



Incidents Psychological 177 

Recognizing these and other symptoms only too well, the 
excited neighbors gathered round, crying: "Did not we say so 
from the beginning! It is a doctrine of devils, and now the 
evil spirits have come upon her. Certainly he is reaping his 
reward." 

The swing of the pendulum was complete, and in his trouble 
Hsi found no sympathy. There was not a man or woman in the 
village but believed that his wife was possessed by Evil Spirits, as 
a judgment upon his sin against the gods. 

"A famous 'Conqueror of Demons/ n they cried. "Let us 
see what his faith can do now." 

And for a time it seemed as though that faith could do 
nothing. This was the bitterest surprise of all. Local doctors 
were powerless, and all the treatment he could think of unavail- 
ing. But prayer; surely prayer would bring relief? Yet pray 
as he might the poor sufferer only grew worse. Exhausted by the 
violence of more frequent paroxysms, the strain began to tell 
seriously, and all her strength seemed ebbing away. 

Then Hsi cast himself afresh upon God. This trouble, what- 
ever it was, came from the great enemy of souls, and must yield 
to the power of Jesus. He called for a fast of three days and 
nights in his household, and gave himself to prayer. Weak in 
body, but strong in faith, he laid hold on the promises of God, 
and claimed complete deliverance. Then without hesitation he 
went to his distressed wife, and laying his hands upon her, in 
the name of Jesus, commanded the Evil Spirits to depart and 
torment her no more. 

Then and there the change was wrought. To the astonish- 
ment of all except her husband, Mrs. Hsi was immediately de- 
livered. Weak as she was, she realized that the trouble was 
conquered. And very soon the neighborhood realized it too. 

The completeness of the cure was proved by after events. 
Mrs. Hsi never again suffered in this way. And so profoundly 



178 Recollections and Reflections 

was she impressed, that she forthwith declared herself a Christian 
and one with her husband in his life-work." 

Another quotation gives a remarkable insight as to how 
Hsfs power depended upon his complete consecration. It con- 
cerns a young man named K'ong, who was o demoniac. In one 
of his paroxysms Hsi was sent for: 

"Strangely enough, as soon as Hsi appeared, E?ong became 
suddenly quiet. His cries and struggles ceased, and the men 
who were holding him relaxed their efforts. 

"He is well, he is well !" they cried. "The Spirit has de- 
parted." 

Not satisfied with this, however, Hsi laid his hand upon 
the young man's head and prayed for him earnestly in the name 
of Jesus. The result was immediate and complete relief, and 
there seemed every reason to hope that the trouble was perma- 
nently conquered. 

One of the missionaries present was much impressed with 
all that had taken place, and especially with the power attending 
Hsi's coming and his prayers. Having a sum of fifty dollars at 
his disposal, he brought it to him, saying : 

"The expense of your work must be considerable, please 
accept this contribution, to be used as you think best." 

Surprised and hardly realizing how much it was, Hsi 
took the silver, but had scarcely done so before he began to feel 
troubled. Fifty dollars seemed so large a sum, and it had come 
so suddenly. He had accepted it, too, without waiting to ask 
counsel of the Lord. Was it cupidity that had moved him ? Had 
he fallen into a trap cunningly devised by the devil ? The more 
he thought about it the more he felt uneasy. So, leaving the 
money with Mrs. Hsi for safekeeping, he went away alone to pray. 

Hardly had he found a quiet place, however, before a mes- 
senger came hurriedly to seek him. 



Incidents Psychological 179 

"Come quickly; the matter is serious," he cried, "K'ong 
is worse than ever. And we can do nothing." 

Much distressed, Hsi returned to the scene of trouble; and 
the moment he entered the room K'ong pointed straight at him, 
shouting with fiendish triumph : 

"You may come, but I fear you no longer! At first you 
seemed high as heaven, but now you are low, low down and small. 
You have no power to control me any more." 

And the worst of it was, Hsi knew his words were true. He 
had no grip of faith or power in prayer, and felt distinctly that 
the money had robbed him of his strength. With shame and 
sorrow he turned away and went for the silver, followed by the 
mocking cries of the unhappy demoniac. Then, finding the 
donor, he openly returned the gift, confessing that the sudden 
possession of so large a sum had come between his soul and God. 

With empty hands, but lightened heart, he now went back 
to the excited crowd. K'ong was still raving wildly, defying any 
power on earth to restrain him. But Hsi was in touch once 
more with his Master. Quietly, in the name of Jesus, he com- 
manded the tormentor to be silent, and leave his miserable vic- 
tim. Immediately, with a fearful cry, K'ong was thrown into 
convulsions, from which, however, he presently emerged, quiet 
and self-possessed, though much weakened for the time being. 

This was to Hsi a deeply painful lesson, emphasizing afresh 
the all-important truth that, as he expressed it, "the ungrieved 
presence of the Holy Spirit is more to be desired, than abund- 
ance of gold and silver." 

Mrs. Runcie, the wife of the late Rector of St. Joe, one of 
the most revered and saintly men I have ever met, was a niece 
of the celebrated Robert Dale Owen, who established the Colony 
at New Harmony, Indiana, of people who agreed with him, in 
living a Communal life. They were all Deists, and two or three 
generations grew up without even a sight of a Bible. Mrs. 



180 Recollections and Reflections 

Runcie has told us in her book, "Divinely Led*' how a Bible 
accidentally fell into her hands, its interest riveted her and she 
became converted. 

She was greatly attached to her cousin, Rosa Dale Owen, 
and for twenty years she daily prayed for her, "Lord, give her 
light." They were together in New York, and one morning she 
accompanied Mrs. Runcie, for the sake of the morning walk, to 
the Early Sacrament at Dr. Houghton's Church — "The Little 
Church 'Round the Corner" — as it used to be called. She sat at 
the end of the long narrow Church. At the conclusion of the 
service Mrs. Runcie found that she had had some sort of a 
seizure. She managed to get her home, and she remained in a 
stupor for three days. When she came to herself the first thing 
she said was, "I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God." 
The inestimable fact was new to her heart, but not to her intel- 
lect. She rose from her bed a convinced Christian. She was 
Confirmed by the late Bishop Seymour, on a Friday in Lent, 
and went back to New Harmony. 

Of course, in all religious matters, she was a complete novice 
and knew not where to turn for instruction and guidance. One 
night she prayed desperately to her new-found Saviour, to know 
what to do, when she was answered by a voice, "Read Jeremiah, 
Third Chapter, Fifteenth Verse." She lit her lamp, and with 
trembling hands, sought for the Book of Jeremiah, of whose 
existence she was until then unaware. She found the Chapter, 
and read the verse, "I will give you Shepherds according to mine 
heart, which shall feed you with knowledge and understanding." 
Knowing no Shepherd but Bishop Seymour, she returned to 
New York and placed herself under his instruction. 

Once again, one of the Owens, herself a devout Church- 
woman, declared that it was a religious duty to fast. Rosa re- 
belled against what she considered dictation, although willing 
and anxious to do what was according to the will of God. Again 
in her perplexity she earnestly prayed for direction, and was 



Incidents Psychological 18i 

answered by the same voice, "Read the sixth verse of the fifty- 
eighth Chapter of Isaiah/' where she found, "Is not this the fast 
that I have chosen to loose the hands of wickedness, to undo 
the heavy burdens ?" 



CHAPTEE XXIV. 

The Tractarian Movement. 

I was a boy when the Tractarian Movement electrified the 
Church. 

The Tractarian Movement was a revival of that Sacerdotal- 
ism which has no place in the New Testament, or in the scheme 
of the Gospel, but is really an unhealthy growth which fattens 
upon the central sin of human nature — the pride of the heart 
of man. Ever since the third century, by which time the 
clerics had amalgamated themselves into a distinct order, they 
had been heading for distinction and power. The vast majority 
of people have no independent thought, much less any capability 
for independent research by which to establish their sentiments. 
Then we are all closely surrounded by the mysterious and the 
unseen, and we are all inevitably proceeding into the invisible 
world, so that anyone who asserts sufficiently that he has knowl- 
edge of the unseen life and has at his command processes which 
will assure safety in the unknown world, is sure to find a vast 
number of people to believe him. 

These are the basic principles on which Sacerdotalism 
flourishes. 

The assumptions of the priest, however, had become so 
preposterous in the seventeenth century that Europe, which now 
had access by printing to the only authority we possess on 
Spiritual matters — the Bible — discovered for itself that the pre- 
tentions of the clerics had no foundation or authority in the 
Word of God; and by a violent upheaval, which we called the 
Reformation, shook off the fungus of Sacerdotalism. But 

182 



The Tractarian Movement 183 

Protestantism removing from the masses the imperative leader- 
ship they had been accustomed to inevitably left them to their 
own devices. It is far more easy to follow prescribed rules than 
it is to live by Principles, and the consequence was that in 
some decades of Protestant individualism all things connected 
with Church discipline had almost entirely lapsed; the Services 
themselves had become perfunctory and the spirituality of the 
masses had sunk to a low level of indifference. 

The Tractarian Movement did for the Church what the war 
is doing for the nations — it compelled them to set God's House 
in order. It was time something happened. I knew a Church 
in our neighborhood in Yorkshire where the clergyman could 
not preach in the pulpit because the parson's hen was "sitting" 
in it ! The cloths on the communion tables were moth-eaten and 
shabby; and many parishes had a rush-bearing Sunday, when 
they covered the aisles for a year with new rushes. 

My father, and even I, myself, preached in a black gown, 
with bands. 

But the Tractarian Movement, which of course was the old 
story of Sacerdotalism, finding a ready acceptance in the natural 
pride of the human heart, and offering something like "salvation 
by works," swept like an epidemic through the Church, and the 
ministrations of the clergy advanced bodily. Churchyards were 
trimmed, churches were cleaned, and although to preach in a 
surplice was looked upon with great suspicion as covering Popish 
doctrines, yet it gradually came to be adopted. Surpliced choirs 
were an attraction both to the congregation and the singers; 
Church ordinances began to look up, and a new life everywhere 
appeared. It is almost forgotten nowadays that stoles were then 
introduced, and to wear colored ones often created great search- 
ings of heart. 

As in all such movements there were plenty of extremists, 

who naturally brought disrepute upon their more sober leaders. 

In my early days at Blackheath, before I was ordained, I 



184 Recollections and Reflections 

was a member of the choir of St. James', Hatcham, one of the 
typical ritualistic churches of London, but I soon found that 
the excessive adoration and mysterious movements which sur- 
rounded the altar did not affect the life of the servitors in the 
vestry, and I had proof of what I ought to have known — that 
external performances do not necessarily affect internal charac- 
ter, and all such performances ran the danger of satisfying the 
worshipper with their mechanical repetition, instead of using 
them as helps they became mainstays. 

I often heard these things discussed by the leading clerics 
of our neighborhood. Dr. Pusey had built a church, St. 
Saviour's, Leeds, out of his private means, where the principles 
of the Tractarian Movement might be illustrated. The Vicar 
frequently visited my father, for whom he and everyone else 
had a great reverence, and I used to listen to my father's gentle 
reminder that Sacerdotalism was absent from the New Testa- 
ment and that life was given through the Word and not through 
the Sacraments. And I remember well the tremor which passed 
through us when Newman and a few others went over to Kome 
after the Court of Arches had held, in the Gorham Judgment, 
that it was not the teaching of the Church of England that 
Baptism imparted eternal life. 

The Tractarians professed their object to be the restoring 
to the Church of its "Catholic inheritance." The supposition on 
which the Roman system is founded is, that our Lord gave to 
St. Peter the power of Absolution and Consecration; they hold 
that he became Bishop of Rome and handed on these divine 
prerogatives to his successors, the Popes of Rome. The Pope 
consecrates the bishops and the bishops the priests, so the priests 
come by the same spiritual powers as St. Peter is presumed to 
have conveyed to the Popes. 

But the New Testament and history supply no facts which 
support this theory. No list of the bishops of Rome record 
Peter as the first. The great ecclesiastical historians all differ 



The Tractarian Movement 185 

as to the length of his residence in the Eternal City and in the 
New Testament there is no hint that he held a pre-eminent posi- 
tion; moreover, he never assumed any superiority over his 
brethren. 

St. James, who was not even an apostle, presided over the 
Council of Jerusalem at which St. Peter was present. St. Paul 
"withstood him to the face," which it is inconceivable that he 
would have done had the senior apostle been placed in a superior 
position by the Lord. And St. Peter himself, from the tone of 
his Epistles, evidently never supposed that he was endowed with 
supreme powers, least of all that he was commissioned to have 
handed them down to a successor. 

But the Tractarian leaders appealed to the early Fathers 
and in them they sought to discover support for the theory of 
"the sacrifice of altar," and Dr. Pusey produced a list of quota- 
tions which appeared to prove his contention. 

When Dean Burgon was at Oxford he, with everybody else, 
revered the eminent President of Magdalen, Dr. Eouth, who died 
in his hundredth year. He was a prodigy of stored-up learning ; 
and one day Burgon asked him what caution, from his vast store 
of learning, would he give to a student just beginning his career. 
The great man replied : "Sir, verify your quotations." 

Dr. Pusey's catena of the Fathers sent many students to 
verify his quotations and none did so more thoroughly than 
Canon Vogan, whose book, "The True Doctrine of the Eucharist" 
I read and re-read, verifying his quotations as far as I was able. 
And I came to a conclusion which exactly tallied with the 
Didache, that the Fathers looked upon the whole Service as the 
Sacrifice and not the Offering of the Consecrated Elements, which 
view of the Eucharist is that of our Prayer Book, where we have 
the Sacrifice of three things: "Praise," "Our Bounden Duty," 
and "Ourselves." The doctrine of "The Eeal Presence," which 
is a main contention of the Neo-Catholics, is unknown to "The 
Fathers." What they held is well expressed by the martyrs, 



186 Recollections and Reflections 

Cranmer and Ridley, who both gave up their lives rather than 
admit anything approaching to the doctrine of Transubstantia- 
tion. Cranmer, in his reply to his inquisitor, Gardiner, said: 
"I say that Christ is but spiritually in the ministration of the 
Sacrament, and you say that he is but after a spiritual manner 
in the Sacrament/' While Ridley is even more explicit: "The 
Body of Christ is communicated and given, not to the Bread and 
Wine, but to them which worthily do receive the Sacrament." 

The reality of the Body of Christ, "which is the blessed com- 
pany of all faithful people," has been obscured by Sacerdotalism, 
which has thrown the emphasis of the Body of Christ on to the 
Consecrated Elements and away from the mystical, but neverthe- 
less actually Real Body of Christ, which the Holy Communion 
was intended to illustrate and intensify. 

Thus, I was held to the evangelical position; and I have 
lived more and more to regret that the church has drifted away 
from the magnificent truth of the Brotherhood of Christians, 
their actual unity in the Body, which it was evident that the 
Lord instituted the Holy Communion to illustrate and to en- 
force. But, unfortunately, that pride and self-interest which 
early infested the Church at Corinth and drew down upon them 
St. Paul's censure, because they ate the Agape in cliques and 
did not "discern the Body," that is, they did not recognize that 
there was no distinction of rank in the Christian community, 
but that all were members of the same Body and therefore all 
interested in each other, this inoculation produced the disease 
of Sacerdotalism. 

If this, the prime teaching of Christianity, had not been 
obscured, the world never would have been the shameful sight 
it presents today. Eighty-eight per cent of the population of 
this country on the edge of poverty, that is, if their daily income 
were stopped, they would be in actual want. Fifteen civilized 
nations killing each other and only two out of the thousand 



The Tractarmn Movement 187 

millions of the heathen affected by that Gospel which our Lord 
committed to us to propagate. 

The loss of this idea of "Holy Communion" was realized at 
the time of the Reformation, and to emphasize it the stone altars 
were removed by Order and Tables placed in their stead, which 
at the Communion time were carried in "The Body of the 
Church/' This practice was continued in some churches down 
to the middle of the eighteenth century. By this provision the 
people were taught that the Table was the Lord's Table and the 
communicants His guests, and as such were on a par with each 
other and as members of the same household were closely con- 
cerned in each other's interests. But this truth became soon 
obscured by the innate selfishness of the human heart, and the 
Priests lauded it over God's heritage, and it may require the 
severe chastisement of the Lord, which seems to be falling upon 
Europe, before any part of this last truth is regained. 



CHAPTEE XXV. 

General Booth. 

Not a few attempts have been made to bring the Church 
back again to her communitive interest. In the time of Wesley 
she missed a very great opportunity as we all now agree; there 
was a disposition not to make a similar mistake, when the 
Salvation Army began its extraordinary career. 

General Booth was twice my guest. In 1896 he told me 
that Archbishop Benson, Canon Wilkinson and Bishop Wescott 
had conference with him to see if it would not be possible to 
incorporate the Salvation Army as an agency within the Church. 
But the General weighed the efficacy of the Sacraments by the 
interest people took in them. He said: "I knew, but I fairly 
hated to ask him, for Canon Wilkinson was such a holy man, 
how many of his people at St. Peter's, Eaton Square, took ad- 
vantage of the vital benefit, he asserted the Sacrament bestowed" ; 
and he had to answer, about twenty. "Why," I said, "every 
single soldier of the Army attends 'knee-drill/ " and he argued 
that the result of united prayer as seen in the lives and self- 
sacrifice of the Salvationists showed conclusively that the Sacra- 
ments had been elevated to a wrong position in the Church ; they 
had been expected to do that for which they never were in- 
tended. 

I must say he was autocratic and rude, but any man who 
could bring into existence a scheme which would give an honor- 
able livelihood to fifty thousand people and at the same time 
make each one of them a centre of doing good was worthy of 
every respect. 

188 



General Booth 189 

I have had two other members of his remarkable family 
under my roof. The Marechale was, as everybody knows, a 
most extraordinary woman. When she was the leader of the 
Salvation Army in France they say "she discovered the Soul of 
France," and literally worked marvels. But alas ! how frail 
is human nature. Her autocratic father, evidently influenced 
by the jealousies of other officers, commanded her to leave 
France and go to Holland, when she was wholly unacquainted 
with the language whereas she was a perfect French scholar ; and 
when she married Mr. Clibborn, who became infatuated with an- 
other extraordinary man, Mr. Dowie, the General cut her off, 
not only from his assistance, but apparently from his regard. 

His son-in-law, Booth Tucker, was an English gentleman, 
the very antipodes of the General. He had been a magistrate 
in India, and being convinced that Christianity could never make 
any headway in the way it was being preached, gave up his 
position, and even his private fortune of £10,000, and lived and 
dressed as a native and preached the Gospel. He was several 
times imprisoned, but lived to have bestowed upon him the 
highest honor in the gift of the Indian government, the medal, 
"Kaiser-in-Ind." 

When he was over here he established in southern Colorado 
a colony to relieve the destitution in Chicago, expecting to 
induce men with their wives to go to farm the land under the 
direction of an experienced farmer. When he broached his 
scheme to the General in England he cabled him to come and 
consult me, which I took as a very great compliment, consider- 
ing that I had told the General some very plain truths about his 
behavior. 

Of course, the colony failed, not only because the land was 
alkali, but chiefly because the same loose screw which let down 
the man to a position of helplessness kept him from giving that 
energy and continued perseverance which are essential to a 
successful farmer. 



CHAPTER XXVI. 

Matters Electrical. 

I suppose that every man looks back upon the assumptions 
of his youth with something like humiliation. When I was 
twenty-one I was mathematical master, I should have been 
called in this country a professor, in one of the five Irish Royal 
Schools, Foyle College, Londonderry. 

It is true I had obtained some mathematical honors at the 
University, which probably was the reason of my appointment. 
I was reading for a degree in natural and experimental science 
and was therefore concerned in all electrical matters. My taste 
in this direction was not a little gratified by the General Super- 
intendent of the telegraph of the railway. 

Telegraphic science was then much concerned with the 
new Atlantic cable. It will be remembered that after the first 
message the cable declined to transmit any further current. I 
wrote a letter to the Londonderry Sentinel describing what I 
considered the probable defect and suggested a remedy. 

I do not suppose that the leaders of that great enterprise 
ever saw my youthful intrusion into their domain, but it was no 
little gratification to me to find that the next and successful 
cable was constructed upon the methods I suggested, and it gave 
me no little confidence that I had truly grasped some of the 
principles of electrical science. 

In 1878 I had a cottage in Guernsey, where for the health 
of the children we spent one or two summers. I once took with 
me a little portable telephone. It was no bigger than one of 
the wooden bell-pushes we have on our doors. Its interior was 

190 



Matters Electrical 191 

of course an electro-magnet, acting on a limp iron plate, as we 
have it today. It was only a toy and who would have thought 
from that seedling the forest of telephonic communication would 
have spread ? 

I took it to Government House and connected two rooms. 
The Governor listened at one end while his son sang to him in 
the other 'phone : 

Old Obadiah said to young Obadiah, 

I am dry, I am dry ; 
And the young Obadiah said to old Obadiah, 

So am I, so am I. 

More than fifty years ago I used to frequent the Polytech- 
nic in London. Professor Pepper was then the scientific lecturer. 
One day I was in his laboratory and he had a glass globe exactly 
like one of our incandescent lamps. 

Through the glass had been fused twcr platinum wires ; the 
little globe had been exhausted of its gaseous contents. It was 
in fact a Geissler tube. On passing a current of high tension 
the lamp became suffused with light. Putting it into my hand, 
the professor said : "That is the light of the future" ; and with 
some modifications so it has become. 



CHAPTEE XXVII. 

The Destruction of the Old Cathedral. 

A miscreant set fire to the Old Cathedral on Friday night, 
May 15, 1903. We suppose he allowed a candle to burn down 
to some inflammable material placed in the chapel organ. The 
flames soon found their way up the wind ducts to the great 
organ immediately above Avhich was ablaze in a trice, and so set 
fire to the roof. Nothing but the roof indeed burned. All the 
windows were saved except the East window, which was nearest 
the organ, and to our unspeakable grief we watched it melt. By 
warning the firemen not to allow any water to go on the hot 
glass the rest were all preserved and now fill the thirteen win- 
dows of the chancel of the New Cathedral. 

We collected $66,000 of the insurance company, sold the 
site for $30,000, and after much debate purchased the block 
opposite Wolfe Hall, on which we built a Chapter House to ac- 
commodate some of our congregation. We invited eight arch- 
itects, to whom we paid $150 each, to supply us with designs; 
ten others also competed. Tracy and Swartwout of New York 
presented a design for an elaborate Gothic Cathedral. It was our 
intention to build the nave which would do duty for a present 
church, on which we might venture to spend $125,000. At a 
glance I concluded that the Nave of this design could not possi- 
bly be built within our means. However, the Bishop was so 
insistent on our attempting it, and the architects declaring that 
by simplifying much of its ornamentation it might be brought 
within sight of the sum we proposed to spend that we accepted 
th^ Anoi~~ 




THE NAVE OF THE CATHEDRAL. 
THE GABLE AT THE EAST END IS THE ORGAN CHAMBER. 



The Destruction of the Old Cathedral 193 

The getting out of the working plans, even for the Nave, 
was no small undertaking, and when a year had passed we 
became restive, and being anxious to do something towards the 
building the architects suggested that we should lay down the 
foundations. In their design heavy buttresses ran up to the 
roof, bearing its weight. There were eight bays, and the sixteen 
pillars inside were more for architectural effect, only bearing 
their own weight and that of the ceiling, so that the foundations 
for these piers were comparatively small. When the designs 
were submitted for bids, the least bid was $300,000 — a sum far 
beyond our reach. The architects then begged to be allowed to 
design a simpler Gothic structure to fit the same foundations, 
and they produced this very dignified and satisfactory drawing, 
entirely changing the construction; the weight of the roof was 
borne by the piers — each one supports 200 tons of masonry — 
whereas the aisle walls only supported themselves. In altering 
the construction the architects did not sufficiently consider 
whether the original foundations of the piers would be sufficient 
to carry the extra weight ; the consequence was, when the build- 
ing had reached the gutters of the roof, I found on September 
5, 1909, that one of the pillars had cracked. The whole struc- 
ture had to be taken down, larger foundations constructed, and 
the fabric re-erected at a loss to us of $30,000. For seven years 
we worshipped in the Chapter House ; and as each one of the 500 
chairs belonged to somebody, 100 being utilized by the choir and 
the Wolfe Hall girls, no strangers could be seated, and our 
congregation over 400 had to locate themselves in other Churches, 
so that in reality this small handful of devoted Churchmen built 
the Cathedral, which was finished without further mishap and 
on November 5, 1911, we held in it our first Service. 

The stone is Indiana Oolite limestone from the Bedford 
quarries, and is geologically the same strata as that of which 
York Minster is built. The roof is fortified cement and even 
harder than the stone, and is sixty-five feet from the floor, five 



194 Recollections and Reflections 

feet higher than Worcester Cathedral in England; and between 
the pillars it is thirty-four feet, a yard wider than Westminster 
Abbey. The length of the church is 185 feet. 

The two front towers are 100 feet high. The great tenor 
bell occupies alone the East tower, and the other fourteen are 
hung on iron girders in the other. The tenor bell can be swung ; 
the rest are stationary. 

At "the crossing," where some day the great tower will rise 
200 feet — as high as the lantern tower of York Minster — we 
built a Romanesque chancel in order to furnish it with the win- 
dows we had saved from the Old Cathedral. 

The Reredos, which is unique, represents the chief person- 
ages through whom we have received the Bible. The central 
figure is Giotto's Christ. His right hand is raised in Blessing, 
his left hand holds the Book. On the "north" side are eight 
Old Testament saints; on the other side are figures of Jerome, 
who gave us the Vulgate; Erasmus, who edited the Greek New 
Testament ; Wyclif, the translator of the Saxon Bible ; Tyndale, 
the inimitable translator; and Cranmer, by whose authority the 
Bible was delivered to the English people. All these beautiful 
figures were carved in oak by Josef Mayr, who for so long per^ 
sonified the Christus in the Oberammergau Passion Play. The 
front of the Holy Table is an exquisite carving by Peter Rendl 
Mayr's son-in-law, of Giebert's "Last Supper." 

When I was at the Pan-Anglican Conference in 1908, 
happening to know Dean Wace of Canterbury and Dean Robin- 
son of Westminster Abbey, I asked them to give me pieces of 
stone from their celebrated churches; and as a new flying but- 
tress was being placed in Westminster Abbey, the Master Builder 
very kindly had a piece of the old buttress cut into a portable 
shape, and I sent it over, together with the square stone from 
the foundation of Canterbury. These mementoes are imbedded 
in the walls of the vestibule—Jinks in "The Church's One Foun- 
dation." 



CHAPTER XXVIII. 

The Bells. 

One morning I met Mr. George Schleier on the street. He 
told me he wished to present the Cathedral with a peal of bells 
and he gave me a carte blanche to get the best I could. I imme- 
diately began to collect the experience of all the bell authorities 
I conld reach, and among others I wrote to my friend, Canon 
Teignmouth Shore, asking him to make some inquiries of the 
habitues of the Athenaeum, in which Club you are apt to find 
the best of artistic knowledge. He wrote back to me that when 
at Homburg, where he used to go for the Baths every season, 
everybody had been struck with the sweetness and purity of tone 
of a peal of bells which had been presented to the church. He 
found out for me that they were cast by Edelbrock and Co., at 
Gescher, in Westphalia. I learnt that that firm had been cast- 
ing bells in the same place for four hundred years, and I very 
reasonably concluded that if four hundred years of experience 
had not perfected their methods I should not know where to 
look for perfection. After consulting many authorities I finally 
ordered fifteen bells; a peal of twelve descending in the scale of 
E fiat, and by adding three notes. A, E. and F sharp, we can 
play almost any tune. 

The bells were completed, and I went over to Gescher to 
inspect them. They were all in perfect tune as they came from 
their moulds, that is, they were "maiden" bells, but because I 
was ignorant of the fact that our B flat is not the same in 
German, I found the tenor bell, which weighs four and a half 
tons, was half a note too sharp; and as the fault lay in my 

195 






196 Recollections and Reflections 

ignorance, I paid $500 to have it recast. The total cost of the 
bells was $13,000. 

Everybody knows that bells are inscribed, generally, with 
doggerel rhymes. Here are some specimens : 
"I to the Church the living call 
And to the grave do summon all. 5 ' 

The fourth bell at St. John's, Coventry, declares : 
"I ring at six to let men know 
When to and from their work to go." 

At All Saints', Northampton, the treble bell boasts : 
"I mean it to be understood, 
That though I'm little, yet I'm good." 

A Knaresborough bell (1777) is self-confident: 
"If you have a judicious ear, 
You'll own my note is sweet and clear." 

Many of them perpetuate the generosity of their donors. At 
Bentley on one is recorded : 

"John Eyer gave twenty pound, 
To mech mee of losty sound." 

At Bugbrooke, Northampton : 

"Kind benefactor, unto thee 
My note shall sound your piety." 

At Calne: 

"Eobert Forman collected the money for casting this bell 
Of well disposed people as I do you tell." 

But it is almost inexcusable that recent times could not 
produce better inscriptions than these: 
Calne (1848) : 

"I call the living, mourn the dead, 
I tell when year and day are fled ; 
For grief and joy, for prayer and praise, 
To Him my tuneful voice I raise" ; 



The Bells 



197 



and at Picton, the fame of one of the leading bell-founders in 
England, Taylor, of Loughborough, is perpetuated in this 
doggerel : 

"Re-cast by John Taylor and Son, 

Who the best prize for Church bells won, 

At the great EX-I-BI-TION 

INLONDON. 1, 8, 5 & 1 » 

For our bells the following inscriptions were finally decided 
upon. There not being room for any couplets on the five 
smallest bells, on the face of each is printed : 



First bell: 
Second bell: 
Third bell: 
Fourth bell: 
Fifth bell: 



In the Name of, 

The Father, 

And of the Son, 

And of the Holy Ghost, 

Amen. 



The intention being to allow the bells to speak the various 
purposes of their use, each one of the lower ten bells declares 
one of the services. 

Sixth bell: To worship God, in Spirit, Truth and Fear, 

With ringing peal we summon people here. 

Seventh bell: On this Cathedral Church may God's peace 

rest, 
May all who come to worship here be blest. 

Eighth bell: We strike the Hours, which bear man to his 

doom, 
And warn him to be ready for the tomb. 

Ninth bell: From tower high we sight the rising sun, 

And in God's Name proclaim the Day begun. 

Tenth bell: We bless in God's great Name this Denver 

town, 
Beseeching Him its life and work to crown. 



198 



Recollections and Reflections 



Eleventh bell : We thrill with joyous peal the wedding-day, 
And on the happy pair God's blessings pray. 

Twelfth bell: Our "Passing-bell" bids all the neighbors 

pray, 
That into God's care the Soul may pass away. 

Thirteenth bell : We flood the air with melodies divine, 

To fill men's hearts with thoughts of Thee 
and Thine. 

Fourteenth bell : With note of prayer we close the eventide, 

"The darkness deepens, Lord with us abide." 

Fifteenth bell: Our donor's praise we chime with sweet 
accord ; 
"To him and his grant light perpetual, Lord." 

These couplets run around the top of the bells between two 
belts of ornamentation. On the face of the last three bells are 
the inscriptions: 

Thirteenth bell: H. Martyn Hart, D.D., Dean. 
Fourteenth bell: Charles Sanford Olmsted, D.D., Bishop. 
Fifteenth bell : This peal of fifteen bells was presented to St. 

John's Cathedral, Denver, Colo., by George 

C. Schleier. 1905. 

We first built a campanile of wood, from which they were 
transferred to the towers of the Cathedral, where they hang an 
honor and a joy to the city and an everlasting memorial to the 
generosity of Mr. Schleier. 



CHAPTER XXIX. 



The Career of Higher Criticism. 

I have reserved for the last chapter what I believe to be the 
most serious experience of my life — the inroad of Higher Criti- 
cism. 

In 1750 Astruc, a French Court physician, noticed, what 
every casual reader has observed, that in the early chapters of 
Genesis we find the Deity called by two names — Jehovah and 
Elohim. Astruc accounted for this upon the supposition that 
two writers were concerned in the production of the book and 
that some later hand had edited their remains ; one of them was 
in the habit of styling the Deity Jehovah, and the other Elohim. 
This, baldly stated, is the foundation of Higher Criticism. 

In this century this style of criticism has been carried to 
extraordinary lengths, and especially by German students. 
Wellhausen, one of the most distinguished of the group, con- 
sidered that he could detect throughout the Pentateuch the handi- 
work of twenty-two historians. Everybody knows how this 
mode of handling the Word of God spread over Christendom 
until very few pulpits were entirely free from its virus. Men 
of light calibre, of which of course there were not a few, thought 
it gave them a reputation for learning to deal after this manner 
with some of its questions, and so the foundations of the simple 
faith of our forefathers became honeycombed with doubt. 

In 1882 Cassell, Petter & Galpin, the great publishing firm 
in London, persuaded Ellicott, the Bishop of Gloucester and 
Bristol, to undertake the editorship of a commentary of the 
Bible. He engaged a notable corps of the most learned theolo- 

199 



200 Recollections and Reflections 

gians of his time, and they produced in eight volumes a Com- 
mentary of the Old and New Testaments, and I have never 
found, in a wide range of reading, any real difficulties which are 
not reasonably resolved in their notes appended to the text. The 
firm was good enough to present me with one of the earlier copies 
of the work, and after all these years in which we have seen the 
Bible handled with the utmost freedom, and even roughness, I 
still find in Ellicott's Commentary a sufficient explanation of 
scientific, historical and moral difficulties, which with our pres- 
ent state of knowledge would satisfy any reasonable student. 

I have invariably refrained from airing a doubt in the pul- 
pit. A preacher may easily ask a question which in the brief 
time custom allots to his sermon it would be impossible conclu- 
sively to answer, and in the minds of many of his hearers he 
must leave a rankling doubt. There is so much of positive in- 
formation and unquestioned revelation concerning "the things 
which accompany salvation" that it is folly supreme to tamper 
with the dubious and the immaterial. 

I have always considered that it was an easier act of belief 
to credit that the Almighty Father would communicate with his 
Children that that He should not do so. To believe that the 
Creator would call into existence Beings so equipped as to be 
capable of holding communication with the Spiritual world 
about them, and then not give them any revelation to guide them 
in a world filled with perplexity, seems to me more than improb- 
able; and that if He did give any such communication it must 
have been couched in such terms that any of the most ordinary 
of the Intelligencies he had created could comprehend it. There- 
fore I have always believed that common sense persistently ap- 
plied would reveal the meaning of the communication committed 
to the conveyance of language and symbolism, which of course 
was subject to the changes of centuries but which it was within 
the province of research to reveal in its primitive condition. 

The Moasic account of Creation I look upon as placed in 



The Career of Higher Criticism 201 

the opening of the Bible as an evidence that the character of the 
volume was a revelation from the Higher world. The account is 
so exactly what Laplace's Nebular Hypothesis would suggest to 
a person who had some opportunity of beholding six phases of 
the process of Creation from varying points of sight, that it 
would have been an impossibility for Moses to have described 
them by any human conclusion of experience and investigation 
at that period of the world's history. It has only been within 
the last hundred years that Geology has come into existence and 
given us some probable idea of the condensation of the Solar 
System from the nebulous cloud, and the history of the planet 
Earth from Azoic times until the appearance of man. It is in- 
credible that Moses could of himself, that is, from the experience 
of Ins times, have written the account. The only possible ex- 
planation is that as a Seer he was permitted to receive the 
information. The rest of the Book of Genesis is a compilation 
of documents which we now know it was within the capability 
of the earliest generations to inscribe on clay tablets. Each of 
these documents commences with the heading : "This is the gen- 
eration of," or this is the history of. 

Astruc's supposition never appealed to me as being reason- 
able that the Hebrews used various names for the Deity casually 
and without definite intention, because they were a people who 
always exhibited their inclination to write history in nomen- 
clature. How frequently does the phrase occur, "therefore the 
name of that place was so and so," implying that the history of 
.the event was folded up in the name given to the place. Neither 
would it be likely with a people who loved genealogies and their 
connection with the past, that the names of the writers of their 
sacred books would have been wholly forgotten; and those his- 
torians who are known to modern critics by capital letters — 
J. E., etc. — would somewhere have had their names handed down. 
With what I may call these canons of criticism in my mind for 
my guidance, I turn to the volume of the Book for some indica- 



202 Recollections and Reflections 

tion why the Deity was called "Jehovah" 7,600 times, and 2,500 
times "Elohim", and 250 times "EL", and I very soon reach the 
conclusion which is amply satisfactory to myself, at any rate, 
that the Hebrews used these names for certain distinctive char- 
acteristics of the Almighty which the context of their use clearly 
justifies. 

Words are but counters which carry values which the gen- 
eration using them chooses to impose. Everyone remembers 
cases of words which have greatly altered their meaning since 
Elizabethan times, and the only means we have of understanding 
what the people who used them meant by them is by weighing 
the meaning of the sentences in which they occur. 

Take, for example, the important word Jehovah. Its first 
use is by Eve at the birth of Cain. When she saw the first baby 
born into the world she could not have said, as the Authorized 
Version presumes, "I have gotten a man from Jehovah," and 
still more unlikely did she say as the Revised Version has it, "I 
have gotten a man with the help of Jehovah" ; what she did say 
was, "I have gotten a man 'eth ? Jehovah" — "eth" meaning 
"even," because her mind was full of one idea. The solitary light 
in the sky for her was that her Seed should overcome their 
Enemy, the Serpent, and restore them once more to the happi- 
ness of the Paradise they had lost. How she came by the word 
of course we do not know, because we are not informed of how 
much cosmic knowledge our first parents were furnished with for 
the purposes of their mundane existence, but seeing that the 
genus man is not equipped with instincts, he must have had im- 
parted to him in the first instance some knowledge to fit him for 
his inexperienced position. Let her have come by the word as she 
may, that she meant that her infant was to be her Deliverer, 
her Saviour, her Redeemer, is evident enough ; and that the early 
peoples attached this meaning to Jehovah is indicated in the 
sixth chapter of Exodus, where Moses is stating his objections 
to accepting the Divine commission to lead his people out oi 



The Career of Higher Criticism 203 

Egypt, he confesses himself at a loss by what name to refer to 
the great Personality who had sent him. He is told to inform 
the people he is a messenger from Jehovah, and then is stated 
the reason for what may have been an unexpected use of the 
word: "By my Name Jehovah I was not known unto Abraham, 
Isaac and Jacob, but by my Name El Shaddai," which of course 
means to say that the Patriarchs needed no rescue nor Eedemp- 
tion, all they wanted was protection since they were feeding 
their flocks in an already occupied country, so God revealed 
Himself to Abraham as "I am thy shield/' But now the chil- 
dren of Israel were slaves under the Egyptian power and they 
could only be liberated by a stronger power who would then 
become their Eedeemer or Saviour, and this they understood by 
the word Jehovah. 

Of course, we know that "Jehovah" is a word produced by 
a Jewish monk in 1515, who supplied to the four consonants 
J. H. V. H. the vowels of the name Adonai — the word for Lord 
in social use ; the actual pronunciation or spelling of the incom- 
municable Name we do not know, the higher critics seem to 
think it might have been Yahveh. 

In determinately following out this assumption vast time, 
patience and erudition have been expended, especially by Ger- 
man students, in dissecting our present Kecord and apportioning 
its parts to these various writers. For example, the narrative of 
the Noachian Deluge is said to be the combination by some later 
hand of two earlier records, one by E. and the other by J. or P. 
— the Priestly narrator — but on examination it appears that 
Jehovah and Elohim are used discriminately, the one seven times 
and the other thirteen. Wherever Jehovah is used there ia 
present the idea of salvation. Here are the seven cases where 
God discovers Himself as the preserver of Noah: "Jehovah said 
unto Noah' — "Jehovah commanded him" — "Jehovah shut him 
in" — "Noah builded an altar unto Jehovah" — "Jehovah smelled 
a sweet savor" — "Jehovah said in his heart" — "Noah said, 



204 Recollections and Reflections 

Blessed be Jehovah Elohim of Shem." In the other thirteen 
eases where Elohim is used and translated God, the reference is 
to God's power over nature — His presence on the earth. 

Of course, there are numerous difficulties in the Bible and 
some of them still wait for solution, but I believe that if we 
could arrive at the original words used by the Inspired Writers 
we should find they invariably express Truth. Not that I would 
accept verbal Inspiration, but it stands to reason that if the 
Almighty Father chose to communicate with his Children 
through a human medium, He would at least take care that 
while He left the Inspired Writer to express the sentiment in 
his own language, He would see to it that no wrong word was 
used and that succeeding generations should receive the revela- 
tion unimpaired. 

The extraordinary instance of the writers of the New Testa- 
ment being prevented from once using the title Priest for the 
officials of the New Testament has been already referred to. St. 
Peter indeed exactly states the process of Inspiration when he 
says, "That no prophecy of Scripture is of any private interpre- 
tation" ; the word for "private" here is in seventy-seven other 
places rendered by "his own." The Apostle therefore means 
"that no Inspired person can explain Scripture by his own mental 
power, but to explain it, one needs the same illumination of the 
Holy Spirit by which it was originated — "No prophecy of Scrip- 
ture is of the prophet's own elucidation. For inspiration came 
not in old time by the will of man : but Holy men of God spake 
as they were borne along by the Holy Ghost." 

When reasonably considered, no other plan than this could 
be adopted. The Divine Being could only communicate to men 
who were qualified to receive the communication, that is, to 
Spiritually-sensed men, and these men composed the Church — 
the people who are walking not by sight but by Faith, who live 
not aftetr the Flesh but by the Spirit. 

We frequently hear the "Catholics" declaring that inas- 



The Career of Higher Criticism 205 

much as the Church existed before the Bible that therefore the 
authority of the Church is superior to that of the Bible and the 
Church must be the interpreter of the Bible. The truth is that 
the Church is the receiver of the communication — there could be 
no other. The Church is to the Bible what the bottle is to the 
wine. Of course it is possible to get the wine without the bottle 
by going to the winefat, into which the grapes were originally 
squeezed, but in the vast majority of cases the bottle is an essen- 
tial to the conveying of the wine. 

There are 30,000 promises in the Bible, most of them con- 
nected with the future. Now, the value of a promise is entirely 
measured by the probity of the promiser and his capability of 
performing his words. To throw a doubt on any portion of the 
Inspiration of the Bible and its absolute Truth, is to weaken, if 
not to annul, the promises. I have, therefore, ever considered 
that the main object of a Preacher should be to assert and reas- 
sert the unimpeachable truth of the Word of God, and to clear 
away those evident misunderstandings which are necessarily due 
to the transference of the Divine Message from one language 
into another and from one age to another. This may well be 
done without awakening any doubts in the minds of the congre- 
gation; and if a minister of the Gospel will studiously confine 
himself to teaching and preaching the Word of God, he will 
always find plenty of ready hearers, and because of their number 
his Church will flourish and the Spirituality of his people will 
deepen. 

For giving me "the Grace of perseverance" to do this, rather 
than being attracted by transient matters of passing interest, I 
"thank God and take courage." 

To this mode of preaching I wholly ascribe what some peo- 
ple are good enough to call my long success. 



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